Calling music sales this year disappointing is an understatement, but Billboard is finally making a move that should change that. The magazine and Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks music sales, said today that it will finally include album streams to calculate its charts.
This is easily the biggest change for Billboard since 1991, when the Billboard 200 album chart finally began using actual sales figures from SoundScan instead of basing the charts on data from record stores.
The New York Times reports that the first chart that will reflect the changes will be out on Dec. 4, covering the week from Nov. 24 to Nov. 30.
Billboard and Soundscan will include 1,500 streams of a song as a single album sale. They will also include “track equivalent albums,” which is a formula where 10 total song downloads are counted as one album sale, notes Rolling Stone. Data will be taken from Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Google Play.
Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard’s director of charts, told the Times that this new formula will finally allow Billboard to track the popularity of music beyond the one time a consumer buys an album. “Now we have the ability to look at that engagement and gauge the popularity of an album over time,” he said.
This new formula should help newer artists significantly. For example, Ariana Grande’s My Everything is still a much-buzzed about record thanks to her hit singles. But it only sold 10,000 copies last week. If the new formula was in place, it would have been at No. 9 instead of No. 36.
It could also give albums from popular artists like Coldplay and Maroon 5, whose albums start strong and then fall off the next week. As new singles are released off their albums and become popular on Spotify, for example, the albums could jump higher on the Billboard 200, even if more people aren’t actually buying/downloading the album.
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