Billboard 200 starts counting streams and track sales as album-equivalent units

Why it matters

December 3, 2014. Billboard announced that the Billboard 200 album chart would, beginning the following week, count streaming activity and individual track sales as "album-equivalent units." The conversion rates: 1,500 audio streams equaled one album, and 10 track sales equaled one album. The change was the formal moment commercial-music-industry math caught up with how people actually listened to music. The methodology change reshaped the commercial rap-album strategy almost immediately. Within two years, deluxe-edition re-releases (a common Drake move), surprise album drops (Beyoncé had pioneered this in late 2013, then it became standard), and high-track-count LPs designed to maximize streaming yield (Migos's Culture II at twenty-four tracks; Drake's Scorpion at twenty-five) became standard practice. The rap-album as a fixed object with a release date and a single track-list became, instead, a kind of accumulating cloud of content that could be added to, gamed, recalibrated. You can argue the change was good for artists (more flexibility) or bad for art (fewer fully-realized albums). Both arguments have evidence. The math has not gone back.