Most weeks, we get new concert stats by this time. Some weeks, those reports are late. Somebody is getting into the holiday grog a little early….or maybe they are a little busy.
You know who is busy? Billboard. They just announced a MASSIVE change to the BB200 chart. Since it’s inception, the BB200 has tracked sales of albums. There was a sea change in 1991 when they started using SoundScan Point of Sales data instead of whatever cobbled together reporting they had before. After The Eagles released a Walmart exclusive album that had massive sales, BB decided to change the rules to include single vendor albums in the count (much to the chagrin of Britney fans because that pushed her back to having the number 2 album that week). Then, after Michael Jackson died and his album sales went through the roof, they changed the recurrency rules for the BB200 so that older albums could chart. But that’s pretty much it for the big changes. But that changes look like peanuts compared to the radical changes that are going to happen the Black Friday reporting week.
In an attempt to more clearly represent the current music landscape, the BB200 will now include track sales and streams. For a while, the industry has been throwing around the term “Track Equivalent Albums” (I remember when we first discussed them here at MJs and the general attitude was that the industry was trying to put lipstick on a pig). TEAs are 10 track sales that count as one album sales. TEAs will now be included in the BB200 stats. For streams, 1500 streams will count as one album sale. I begin to see why there has been all this fuss about Spotify in these last few weeks.
Not to fear, they will maintain a Top Album Chart just for sales and the genre album charts will be unaffected.
IDK. I get that they are trying to more closely reflect the changing environment, but albums are albums. The streaming and track sales are already reflected in the singles chart. An album is the ability to sell somebody a collection of your music. Should 7 million people buying your one hit wonder count as 700K in album sales? There was a brief history in time when there was no valid single options (late 90s and early 00s) when album sales were massive. But, back in the glory days, the industry moved a lot of 45s (google it young Padawans). They didn’t bundle those sales with albums back then. I could get behind a new chart that reflected the TEAs and SEAs, but I know they want to impact their flagship Album chart.
What say you?
And now a little fun with numbers- revenue per format
Bricks-and-Mortar CD (high End Royalty)- $1.00
Bricks-and-Mortar CD (low End Royalty) – $0.30
iTunes CD – $0.94
Track Equivalent Albums ($0.09 per track – 10 tracks) – $0.90
Stream Equivalent album ($0.006 to $0.0084 per stream – 1500 streams) – $9 to $12.60
