Billboard charts will give more weight to paid streams from 2018

Starting next year, the Billboard charts will weight streams differently when compiling their charts, giving more importance to paid tiers of subscription streaming services and less weight to free and ad-supported services.

According to the US charts giant:

"Beginning in 2018, plays occurring on paid subscription-based services (such as Amazon Music and Apple Music) or on the paid subscription tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported platforms (such as SoundCloud and Spotify) will be given more weight in chart calculations than those plays on pure ad-supported services (such as YouTube) or on the non-paid tiers of hybrid paid/ad-supported services."

The Billboard Hot 100 is a singles chart compiled from digital sales data, all-genre radio airplay and streaming; the streaming metric will take data from paid subscription streams, ad supported streams and programmed streams, all of which will be weighted differently.

The Billboard 200 is their albums chart, and from next year will adjust the weighting of paid subscription audio streams and ad-supported audio streams in its streaming calculations; the chart ranks the most popular albums of each will according to a combination of traditional album sales, track equivalent albums, and streaming equivalent albums.

This change is being made in order to better reflect user activity by giving more weight to certain "levels of consumer engagement and access - along with the compensation derived from those options".

The ARIA singles charts have included streaming since 2014 and the album chart began counting streams earlier this year. Billboard counts programmed streaming such as internet radio service Pandora, but ARIA does not (and Pandora pulled out of the Australian market this year anyway, leaving Australia with so few programmed streaming options distinguishable from digital radio that it’s a moot point).

You can read Billboard’s full explanation here. Below are the services that will be included and which type their data will be calculated as.

 Hot 100 (+ Genre Charts) Streaming

Billboard 200 (+ Genre Album Charts) Streaming Services