While chart democracy is in theory a good thing, the album chart basically turned into a weekly competition to see which artist’s most indiscriminate, will-buy-anything-with-the-act’s-name-on-it fans would show up in the first seven days. During 2003, 34 different albums topped the chart. After 2000, when album sales began to erode, the music biz came to over-rely on the devoted fan, and turnover atop the chart only increased. And that was when the music industry was healthy. The music industry had adjusted to SoundScan by then, front-loading promotion for new albums and (not unlike a presidential campaign team) driving an artist’s “base” into record stores. That door began spinning more furiously in early 1997, when a then-record eight different albums in eight weeks topped the chart. In the SoundScan Era, this became the norm-the top of the Billboard 200 became a revolving door. What all of the above albums also have in common, however, is they were rapidly in and out of the No. Mind you, these albums all topped the chart through legitimate means: selling lots of copies in their first week. 1 after SoundScan, that happened dozens of times per year.

Prior to SoundScan, only six albums in chart history debuted at No. On the album chart, SoundScan revealed that albums open like movies: A title’s biggest week is often its first. For example, on the Hot 100, SoundScan clarified that many hit songs open big with an act’s diehard fans, fall off a little for a month or two while radio catches up, then become mass-appeal, chart-topping smashes later. It revealed hip-hop and country music’s massive sales, establishing them as legitimate, pop-promotion–worthy genres it gave the lie to numerous overhyped classic-rock acts whose sales weren’t as mighty as charts previously showed and it better reflected the pattern by which artists and songs yo-yo in and out of public consciousness. SoundScan utterly revolutionized how we define a hit. The barcode-scanning technology, which tallied record sales accurately for the first time, launched in the early ’90s-debuting on Billboard’s album chart in May 1991 and the Hot 100 in November 1991. When it comes to the charts, it is impossible to overstate the importance of SoundScan (later referred to as Nielsen SoundScan after the ratings-measurement company acquired the technology). But that hasn’t been the case for five weeks now. Since a pure, traditional full-album sale still counts far more for the chart than does a track sale or a stream, most weeks, the country’s best-selling album is still the No. The formula is pretty straightforward: 1,500 song streams, or 10 purchased tracks, equal one album sale. Since late 2014, Billboard has combined traditional album sales with thousands of single-track sales and millions of streams, to determine the most “ consumed” albums in the U.S. The last five weeks, Drake’s sales have been boosted by Billboard’s new chart math. But Views has only been the best-selling album in America for the first two of those seven weeks. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, the Billboard 200. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.ĭrake’s current album, Views, is in its seventh week at No. Drake’s been playing by street-legal mid-’10s chart rules, fair and square. In the last month, Drake has robbed all of them of No. What do these music stars, ranging in age from 23 (Jonas) to 74 (Simon), have in common?

Views from the 6 album revenue