By Hannah Karp
Starting next week there will be new ways for artists to climb
the Billboard 200 album chart: selling singles and racking up
streams on Spotify, changes that could complicate the ways record
labels time the release of big new albums with chart-topping
potential.
Instead of simply tabulating album sales, Billboard, the music
trade magazine, and its data provider, Nielsen SoundScan, will use
a new formula to rank the country's most popular albums, counting
1,500 song streams as the equivalent of one album sale. To qualify,
the streams must occur on on-demand, subscription services such as
Spotify AB, Apple Inc.'s Beats Music, and Google Inc.'s All Access,
which charge about $10 a month. The streams also must be requested
by the user, not served up by custom radio features that some of
the services offer. Streams on ad-supported radio services such as
Pandora Media Inc. won't count, nor will YouTube views, according
to Nielsen.
The 1,500-streams-per-album-sale formula is one that is already
used by many record labels to make other business calculations.
The new ranking system will also count the sales of 10 separate
songs from an album as equivalent to one album sale, also a
long-standing equivalent in the music business.
The album-chart moves follow Billboard's makeover of its Hot 100
songs chart in 2012. Last year Billboard added YouTube views to the
Hot 100 calculation as well.
The new formula poses a conundrum for artists and record labels
when it comes to the timing of new releases. It typically takes
several weeks for songs to peak on streaming services, some label
executives and managers say. But sales are usually highest in an
album's first week, so getting both metrics to peak at the same
time to optimize chart position requires making the music available
on streaming services several weeks ahead of Apple iTunes
Store.
At the same time, though, many artists and labels are reluctant
to release to streaming services first, at the risk of souring
relations with Apple, a valuable marketing partner. Withholding
music from streaming services may also drive sales for the biggest
artists. Most notably, Taylor Swift sold nearly 1.3 million copies
of her new album "1989" in its first week--the biggest sales week
for any album since 2002--without making it available for
streaming.
Nielsen Entertainment analyst Dave Bakula said the changes could
give pop acts and mainstream R&B artists a boost on the album
chart, given that these genres tend to sell and stream more
singles. But he didn't expect that big-selling artists with older
fan bases would suffer much on the charts for lack of
streaming,
YouTube views won't count, he said, because the industry was
concerned that too much of YouTube's content was user-generated and
therefore not "official."
Billboard will still tally pure album sales on a separate chart,
according to a company release, while genre-specific album charts
will remain album-based for now.
The changes to the album chart were reported earlier Wednesday
afternoon by the New York Times.
Write to Hannah Karp at hannah.karp@wsj.com
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