Highlighting the growing influence of streaming on the music industry, the New York Times last week reported that music streams from sites like Spotify and Beats will, for the first time, be included in the calculation of the Billboard 200. In addition, Billboard will also include digital track sales. Previously, the Billboard 200 chart was solely comprised of digital and physical album sales.
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.
The change is to some degree a sign of a broad reconsideration of media measurement in the digital age, as television studios, magazine publishers and others push companies like Nielsen to account for the changes in how people consume media.
Beginning on November 30, music streams and digital downloads will be included in the Billboard 200 tabulation and it'll be interesting to see how the additional data will affect the rankings.
The move to incorporate music streams and digital downloads is entirely appropriate and, arguably, should have been implemented much sooner. iTunes, Pandora, and on-demand streaming services like Spotify are more popular than ever and the Billboard 200 rankings, for some time now, hasn't accurately reflected the more popular music in the country.
Looking ahead, music streaming is arguably poised to jump to even greater heights once Apple incorporates the Beats Music app into iOS.According to a report from the Financial Times last week, Apple is aiming to do so sometime in early 2015, perhaps as early as March.
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