Indeed, on Billboard’s new Hot 100 song chart, eight of Pablo’s 19 tracks were streamed enough times last week to make the list. Inevitably, some tracks on an album will be streamed more than others. You could stream the lead-off track on Pablo, “Ultralight Beam,” 1,500 times in a row, never hearing the rest of the album, and Billboard would tally that as an album sale. That’s regardless of which tracks are purchased or streamed you don’t have to buy or play the whole album. These “equivalent album units” - converted track sales and track streams - now drive chart position. They count 10 track downloads ($1.29 singles you buy on iTunes or Amazon) as equivalent to one album sale, and they count 1,500 track streams (songs you play on Spotify or Apple Music) as one album sale.
To calculate the album chart, Billboard and Nielsen do some basic math to make tracks and streams equal an album. Those prepaid copies were finally sent to fans last week and, hence, count for this week’s chart.īut that’s not the only thing that’s nontraditional about albums that are streamed more than they are purchased. Actually, it’s hard to call even these album sales “traditional” - all are digital downloads (a physical release of Pablo is reportedly in the works for some future date, though likely not in CD form), and a large chunk of them were furnished to fans who attended West’s Yeezy Season 3 release party in February and paid extra for a future copy of the album, whenever it was completed. In all, 28,000 copies of the album sold the traditional way last week. The album is not out in any physical form, and currently digital copies are only for sale via Tidal and at West’s own website.
Pablo was particularly huge on Spotify, the world’s biggest streaming service, which alone accounted for roughly 50 million streams, more than half the total.įor the vast majority of Americans, these streaming services are the only way to hear Pablo. To be exact, 70 percent of the album’s consumption last week was at streaming sites such as Apple Music and Tidal. 1 album to derive more than half its chart points from streaming services. Pablo therefore sets a milestone in Billboard chart lore: It’s the first No. But not this week - Pablo climbed the ladder thanks to its massive streaming sum: 99 million tracks were streamed from the album during the seven-day period. 1 album and the best-selling album are one and the same, even after Billboard factors in all this data. Straight-up album sales are still the single biggest factor in the chart, and most weeks, the No. The Billboard 200 is now a “multi-metric” consumption chart that factors in streams and track sales, in addition to regular album sales, when determining the industry’s biggest albums. 1 has to do with the methodology change Billboard and data-provider Nielsen put into effect on the album chart 16 months ago. The reason Pablo is instead sitting pretty at No. 1, while West’s latest would place at No. And if Billboard still ranked its chart based on which albums sold the most, Chris Stapleton’s nearly year-old album Traveller, fueled by a sweep of last week’s Academy of Country Music awards, would be spending its third cumulative week at No. Actually, five albums sold more copies than Pablo last week. 1s not to be America’s best- selling album. Basically, Ye’s entire studio output since his 2005 sophomore album, Late Registration, has rung the bell on the Billboard 200, and Pablo maintains the streak. 1 debut on the Billboard 200 - his seventh straight, if you include Watch the Throne, his best-selling 2011 collaboration with Jay Z. The Life of Pablo, Ye’s seventh studio album - a project given a splashy release two months ago, then pulled and tinkered with by its creator before being deemed market-ready - is finally No. On Sunday, Billboard made official what chart-watchers had been expecting since February: West has another chart-topper. That might be open for debate - but this week, he achieved an inarguable chart milestone that just might represent the future of hit albums, ones that might not look like albums at all. Kanye West often boasts that he is making the music of the future.
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