In one of their biggest shake ups in decades, Billboard has announced that they are altering the methodology on their historic Billboard 200 album chart, and that it will now take streaming into consideration when charting albums.
Up until now, the Billboard 200—the tally that ranks albums—had been an entirely sales-based chart, placing albums above or below one another solely on how many copies were moved in a single week from both physical and digital retailers. In the chart that will first appear on December 3rd (the top ten at least—Billboard always shares the top ten albums and songs each a day or so before both tallies are refreshed entirely), all major streaming models will be included as well. Those numbers will include the incredibly important Thanksgiving shopping week, one of the busiest for the music industry all year.
Sites and services like Spotify, Beats, Google Play, Xbox, Rdio, Rhapsody and several others will all be included, with others likely to join the fray as the revamped chart matures.
This marks one of the greatest overhauls to a Billboard chart since 1991, when the company partnered with SoundScan to more accurately count the number of albums sold in stores across the country. This time around, Nielsen will be in charge of providing the streaming data that will be used to create the weekly charts.
While streaming one song is fairly easy to count in a singles context, turning that into albums-related data is trickier. Moving forward, Billboard will now be equate 10 digital track sales (from one single album) to one purchase of the album. Along the same lines, 1,500 streams of songs (also from one single album) will now also equal an album sale. So, if you don’t have the money to purchase a new CD but want to help the artist’s ranking on the Billboard 200, just listen to 1,500 songs from that record, and it will count as a sale.
While this may be a huge move for Billboard—and the entire industry as well—shifting chart methodologies isn’t anything new for industry giant, which has shown itself to be progressive in its measurements. Just last year, the company began including YouTube plays when factoring in the biggest songs every week for the Hot 100. With that addition of data, music videos (and the timing on their release) instantly became much more important than they had been in years, as every view helps a song’s ranking. The first week the new Hot 100 system was put into place, relatively unheard of newcomer Baauer started in the top spot with his viral sensation “Harlem Shake”.
The addition of streaming into the closely-watched charts was inevitable, as streaming is quickly on its way to becoming the most common way that people consume their music. Nielsen says that audio play counts so far in 2014 have exceeded 100 billion, whereas sales of albums and singles alike are dropping all the time. Billboard will create a new Top Album Sales chart to measure actual sales of entire albums.
On the drastic and momentous change, Silvio Pietroluongo, VP of charts and data development at Billboard pointed out that the Billboard 200 was meant to show the true nature of music consumption, saying a chart with “album sales would mostly capture the initial impulse only, without indicating the depth of consumption thereafter.”
