I still see album sales figures that compare to the sales numbers back when we were buying CDs, tapes, etc.
For example, this article lists 24 albums that have sold 1+ million in a single week. Several have been released in the digital era. How are they coming up with the numbers as I assume much of the current music is streamed? I pay for a monthly streaming service (Apple Music) but I haven’t actually purchased a physical or digital full album in many years.
Comments
in short, its based on streams,
like 1500 streams = 1 sale
In 2024, album sales are calculated by combining traditional physical sales, digital album downloads, and a combination of streaming equivalents. Specifically, 1,500 on-demand audio or video streams are equivalent to 10 track sales, which equals 1 album sale. Billboard and other organizations use this system to track album sales and chart rankings.
They’ve made an album equivalent units assigning arbitrary numbers to them. It seems Nielsen that is used in the article counts 1500 streams as 1 album sold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Album-equivalent_unit
So…the corps paying the artists are crunching the numbers that determine how much they’re paid… totally no conflicts of interest.