Billboard 200 album chart set to include streaming and digital track sales

America’s Billboard 200 albums chart is to undergo its biggest change in more than 23 years, with the upcoming inclusion of streaming and digital track sales in its data sets.

As is standard across the industry, ten digital track sales or 1,500 streams will be counted as equivalent to one album sale. Data from all major streaming services will be included, including Spotify, Beats Music, Google Play and Xbox Music.

The weekly U.S. album chart will debut this change in its December 3rd top 10 in order to premiere with data from the Thanksgiving weekend – traditionally one of one of the most active music release periods of the year. The full 200 will be posted online the following day, and in print in Billboard’s December 13th edition. It’s the biggest change to the Billboard 200’s composition since May 1991, when Nielsen’s point-of-sale data SoundScan was introduced to track album sales.

The decision comes following a similar one taken by the UK’s Official Charts Company this summer, who moved to include streaming data in their Official Top 40 singles chart from this July – a controversial decision, which saw Ariana Grande become the first artist to have a UK number one record with both streaming and sales data included.