Sunday, November 23, 2014

Billboard 200 Album Chart To Incorporate Streams

Billboard 200 chart image
You have to hand it to Billboard - the company recognizes that it has to change with the times and does so on a regular basis. The latest update will come on Dec. 3 when the Billboard 200 album chart will incorporate on-demand streaming and digital track sales as well as the Nielsen Soundscan point-of-sale data that the chart has been based around since 1991.

The Billboard 200 chart will now consider all major streaming services, including Spotify, Beats Music, Google Play and Xbox Music.

In determining the chart, the company will equate 10 downloads to equal 1 album sale, and 1,500 song streams to also equal 1 album sale.

Billboard will continue to publish a traditional equivalent to the former Top 200 chart called Top Album Sales that will rely on traditional Nielsen data to determine rankings.

It's been estimated that there have been more than 100 billion (yes with a "B") streams that have been listened to this year so far. It's great that those streams can now be figured into actual chart rankings.
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Won't labels have their staff and/or hire people to stream their artists music, to make it appear that an album isn't a stiff? And to perhaps push an album to gold or platinum. Labels used to have people call MTV to request their artists videos back in the day. I can see it happen with this. Thoughts?

Unknown said...

Mike no matter how the charts are calculated certain labels and artists will make the most out of it and purposely skew the results. It really is not expensive to buy your way into the charts as it is and by doing so you can gain more sales as a result of the increased airplay.

Anonymous said...

Agree with Mike and Peter. Billboard's charts are a mess, just a random hodgepodge of easily manipulated data. That's not entirely Billboard's fault, it's just a reflection of the current state of the industry. It's the "new normal", and we're just gonna have to get used to it! cheers, Marcello

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