Nielsen SoundScan Finally Add Streams, Downloads To Album Sales Chart
[UPDATED] In what most in the music industry see as a long overdue move Nielson Soundscan will add both streams and downloads to their weekly Top 200 album sales chart published by Billboard. Beginning with the Dec. 3rd chart (sales for the week ending Nov. 30 which includes Black Friday), music streams from Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Beats and others will become part of the ranking using the calculation of 1500 song streams as as equal to an album sale.
Album Equivalents
- Neilson is calling this new measurement – 1500 streams + 1 album – "a stream equivalent album.”
- Full album downloads will also count towards the chart ranking, alongside "track equivalent albums” – 10 downloaded tracks = 1 album.
“We’re looking at on-demand audio streaming being up 50% year-over-year (vs. 2013). When you’ve got the metrics that we’re traditionally measuring like sales going down, with albums down 13% on the digital side and down about 17% on the physical side and tracks being down about 13% year-over-year, measuring that method of consumption that is really where consumers want to be right now is critical,” Nielson SoundScan SVP Of Industry Insights David Bakula told Variety.
