Introducing Scottish Hip Hop Charts: what we’re building and why

Scottish hip hop has never had a shortage of music. What it has often lacked is one place where you can actually see what is moving, find the artists behind it and keep a record of what is happening week after week.

That is the basic idea behind Scottish Hip Hop Charts.

SHHC is an independent project built around a simple question: what is actually moving in Scottish hip hop this week?

Rather than somebody picking a favourite ten tracks, the weekly charts are based on changes in public platform counters across the chart period. YouTube and SoundCloud are kept completely separate, and the ranking is numerical rather than editorial.

If one eligible YouTube video gains more measured views during the week than another, it ranks higher on the YouTube chart. The same principle applies to SoundCloud plays.

That does not mean the song is "better". It does not mean SHHC endorses it. It simply means that, during that measured period, the public counter moved more.

Why build it this way?

Scottish hip hop covers a lot of ground.

There are established artists, tiny underground accounts, drill, boom bap, grime, alternative rap, Gaelic hip hop, producers, collectives and people making music in parts of Scotland that are easy to miss if you only follow the same playlists or pages.

So SHHC was never meant to begin with a hand-picked list of who matters.

The approach has been to build an artist database from different sources, verify the Scottish connection and then find eligible public releases on the platforms we can measure.

If somebody is missing, the answer should not be "we don't rate them".

It should be: send us the link.

Public submissions are part of the system for exactly that reason. The database will never be perfect, especially this early, but it can keep getting better as more music is found, submitted and corrected.

The charts are only one part of it

The Top 10s are the most visible part of SHHC, but the project is already growing beyond a weekly graphic.

The site is building permanent artist and track records so people can see who is being monitored and what music is connected to them.

There is a growing producer directory, a Bandcamp catalogue for releases that do not fit neatly into a streaming chart, and an events section aimed at making more of the activity around the scene easier to find.

Now there is also this News & Features section.

That gives us somewhere to report on the charts properly, look at the data behind them, speak to the artists appearing in them and document what is happening as the database grows.

The aim is not to suddenly pretend SHHC is a big music magazine. The useful part is that the reporting can come directly from information the project is already collecting.

Independent means independent

SHHC is not affiliated with the Official Charts Company, YouTube or SoundCloud.

There is no paid route into a chart position and editorial coverage does not affect ranking.

Being accepted into the database means a release meets the criteria to be measured. It does not mean SHHC is recommending it, and being featured in an article does not give an artist any advantage in the chart.

That separation matters.

The chart measures what happened. Articles can then tell some of the stories around what happened.

Where it goes from here

The first published charts are now live, and from here the most important thing is repetition.

Measure the same way every week. Publish on Thursday. Keep adding missing artists and releases. Fix mistakes when they appear. Listen to the people actually using it.

As the weeks build up, so does the history.

We will start to be able to see first Top 10s, climbs, falls, returns, long-running tracks, repeated #1s and artists building momentum over time.

That is when a weekly chart starts becoming something more useful: a record of a scene that is usually scattered across dozens of different platforms and accounts.

SHHC is still early. That is the point.

The first chart is the beginning of the record, not the finished product.