'Billboard' to factor streams into album chart

In an effort to keep up with the changing ways that people listen to music, Billboard will start factoring streams into its weekly album chart.

In the week beginning Monday through Nov. 30, Billboard and Nielsen SoundScan will include sales and streams in the Billboard 200, according to the New York Times. In doing so, Billboard and SoundScan will count 1,500 song streams from services such as Spotify, Rdio, Google Play, Beats Music and Rhapsody as a single album sale.

As a result, artists may find longevity at the top of the chart for multiple weeks, rather than plummet after a strong debut. As the Times points out, Ariana Grande's sophomore effort My Everything opened at No. 1 in September, moving 169,000 copies, but was No. 36 this last week, selling 10,000 copies. Had streaming also been included, she would have landed at No. 9 instead.

"It's been very difficult over the last two or three years to communicate the charts to radio stations," Daniel Glass, founder of Glassnote Records, told the Times. "I've been Scotch taping and Band-Aiding Shazam and Spotify, bringing in all this data for them. Now with this all-in-one streaming chart, it's a much truer reflection of how much is being consumed."

Although, the new consideration will have little-to-no effect on artists such as Taylor Swift, who pulled her music from Spotify but handily topped the Billboard 200 chart for a third week in a row, bringing the total copies of 1989 sold up to 2 million.

Then again, "no amount of streaming in the world could keep Taylor from No. 1," David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen, said to the Times.

It's the biggest change to the Billboard 200 since 1991, when the magazine began using hard sales data from SoundScan to count albums moved, the Times says. But Billboard began casting a wider net last year, when it started factoring in YouTube views into its Hot 100 songs chart, and earlier this year, began separate trending charts to track artists' and songs' activity on social media.

The first Billboard 200 chart that incorporates streaming numbers will be published on Billboard's website Dec. 4.