Music Charts No Longer Make Sense (qz.com)

American rapper Future's back to back new albums have created a stir among music enthusiasts and the studios alike. Billboard today refreshed its weekly US Top 200 chart, and the American rapper officially became the first artist to ever knock his own album out of the #1 spot with another one of his albums. Future released the self-titled FUTURE on Feb. 17. One week later, the artist then dropped a second album HNDRXX which is the new champion. What does it mean, though? Confusion, some say. From a report on Quartz: Up till December 2014, Billboard's Top 200 chart -- which pulls its numbers from data juggernaut Nielsen -- measured new music in the US only by album sales. As music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, came into the mainstream, Nielsen and Billboard revamped their system to be based off "units." How does is work? One "unit" is equivalent to either one album sale, 10 track sales, or 1,500 song streams. In other words, listeners on a streaming platform would need to stream a Future song 1,500 times for it to count the same way a single album purchase does. While that number may seem high, consider that it costs (more or less) $9.99 a month to stream tens of thousands of songs, as opposed to dropping $10-15 on a single album to own it, either physically or digitally. That means people who subscribe to online streaming services aren't taking out an additional cost to listen to every new Future song or album or the same ones over and over again -- it's essentially free. It becomes an odd, if necessary, way of calculating charts, because it means people who pay the most for an artist's music count for the least when sales are tallied.

Comments

As if they ever meant anything

[grasshoppa]

Given the pay to play nature of radio, charts only ever really showed who paid the most money for airtime.

They've been meaningless for a long time now.

Re:Headline

[SeaFox]

Nothing in TFS explains to me why, "Music Charts No Longer Make Sense". Is it because an artist overtook himself on the charts? Is it because they've had to change their chart system to keep up with technology?

No, it's because the chart system is not made to deal with this marketing gimmick. The artists clearly had both albums recorded and mastered at the same time, there is no reason they couldn't have been released as single double-length album. He set this up specifically to take the title of "first artist to displace himself at the top of the chart" and get all this free publicity.