The way we consume music has changed which has put the authenticity of sales on the table. Billboard has caught on to the difficulty of streaming calculations and is moving forward with changes. Last October, Billboard announced that they’d be changing their streaming rules.

“Greater emphasis to be given to paid subscription streams, with ad-supported activity remaining an important factor on the album & songs charts.”

The previous rules allowed the Billboard Hot 100 Chart to be measured by on-demand streaming (such as YouTube, Spotify, Amazon Music, Spotify) and programmed radio such as Slacker and Pandora. The Billboard 200 albums chart weighed 1,500 streams to equal one album sale from paid or ad-supported subscription services.

The new changes considered:

• how to weigh paid vs. ad-supported and free streams
• the weighting of programmed streams (on a service like Pandora)
• whether streams of YouTube official music videos should be included in the Billboard 200 albums chart

As promised, Billboard has announced that paid subscription-based services such as SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music will hold more weight in chart calculations than ad- supported services such as YouTube and hybrid paid/ad-supported services.

New tiers of evaluation for the Hot 100 chart account for paid subscription streams (a full point value per play), ad-supported streams (a 2/3-point value per play), and programmed streams (a 1/2-point value per play). Streaming, along with all-genre radio airplay and digital songs sales data, make up the three metrics of the Hot 100’s methodology – via Billboard.

The Billboard 200 will now include two tiers of on-demand audio streams: paid subscription audio streams (1,250 streams = 1 album unit)and ad-supported audio streams (3,750 streams = 1 album unit). Video streams are still not included.

Billboard has made it clear that they take their record keeping seriously and plan to make changes as trends arise.

“We will always remain responsive to the marketplace so that our charts continue to be the most credible and relevant measure of music popularity.”