1500 Track Streams Now Equals 1 Album Sale

The RIAA announced that it will now count 1500 track streams as 1 album sale when it comes to qualifying for awards like gold records.

This means that 150 streams now equals 1 track sale, thus 10 track sales (1,500 streams) then equals 1 album sale.

It's nice that there's some metric, but there's a big flaw in this logic.

1500 plays of the same song now equals 1 album sale, which is hardly the same thing as a true album sale.

When you buy an album you pay for 10 songs, and although you may not listen to them all as much as the ones you like, you did pay for them all and are exposed to them all.

That's far from the case with the 1500 = 1 logic.

Another thing is that until the announcement on Monday, 100 streams was considered 1 sale, so the bar for a sale has been raised (probably rightfully so).

It's great that the RIAA has announced this metric to reward performance, and although it doesn't seem to be as fair as real sale once was, I can't think of (nor have I read) a better idea of how to measure this.

Ideas anyone?

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An App That Inflates Spotify Streams Disabled

Musicians are a clever bunch when it comes to gaming the system sometimes, as evidenced in inflated MySpace followers way back when, to todays Facebook Likes, YouTube views, and Twitter followers.

While artificially inflating view counts can work for a time, the industry soon catches on and either begins to ignore a certain metric altogether, or find a way to disable it.

That's what happened with an app called Eternify, which allowed an artist to stream endless loops of a song for 30 seconds on Spotify in order to increase the stream counts. However, the company announced that it put a stop to the app's API (application program interface) so that it can no longer game the system.

The app was created by a New York-based ambient act Ohm & Sport, who might have continued to use it for their own music without much notice had they not released the app to the world.

Of course, you don't have to create an app to do something similar, as an artist can just put his album on repeat on Spotify for 24 hours with no app required. That works, at least for now, but you can bet that the streaming service will be keeping a close eye out for anything that tries to game the system in the future.

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