We all know by now that album sales have dwindled as reflective both in figures given and Billboard charts...particularly noting only Taylor Swift's 1989 album has hit platinum status this year.
Well all that is about to change as Billboard is introducing streams and downloads to help calculate album chartings.
Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan, the agency that supplies its data, will start adding streams and downloads of tracks to the formula behind the Billboard 200, which, since 1956 has functioned as the music world's weekly scorecard. It is the biggest change since 1991, when the magazine began using hard sales data from SoundScan, a revolutionary change in a music industry that had long based its charts on highly fudgeable surveys of record stores.
The new chart, covering sales and listening from Monday to Nov. 30, will be revealed on Billboard's website on Dec. 4 and published in print in its Dec. 13 issue. Silvio Pietroluongo, Billboard's director of charts, said that by looking at streams as well as sales, the new chart will more accurately reflect how people listen to music these days.
One expected result is that albums by big pop stars — which tend to open high on the chart and then plunge after just a few weeks — should linger longer in the upper rungs. Ariana Grande's My Everything, for example, which opened at No. 1 in September, was No. 36 on last week's chart, with 10,000 sales. Under the new formula, it would have been No. 9.
SoundScan and Billboard will count 1,500 song streams from services like Spotify, Beats Music, Rdio, Rhapsody and Google Play as equivalent to an album sale. For the first time, they will also count 'track equivalent albums' — a common industry yardstick of 10 downloads of individual tracks - as part of the formula for album rankings on the Billboard 200.
Question is, is this rational or fair as a representation of an album sale, noting that many could stream songs by artists they don't even like.
Buying an album is to support an act, but streaming is more like just listening to internet radio. Why then should it be counted as album downloads?
