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.
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.
