Billboard has announced an upcoming shift in its chart tabulation that will give more weight to music streaming against album sales. Starting in January, the magazine and authoritative record of music consumption will decrease both the on-demand streaming quantity equated to one album sale and the weight differential between paid and ad-supported streams.

Currently, Billboard’s genre-based album charts and Billboard 200 lists measure one album consumption unit as an album sale (or 10 individual songs sold from an album), 3,750 ad-supported streams, or 1,250 paid/subscription streams. Beginning with charts published on Jan. 17 (encompassing data from Jan. 2-8), one album consumption unit will equal 2,500 ad-supported or 1,000 paid/subscription streams, a decrease of 33.3% and 20% shifting the relative weight of paid and ad-supported streams from 1:3 to 1:2.5. These new metrics will also be applied to the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

Billboard’s announcement article expresses that the changes to its charts are designed to “better reflect an increase in streaming revenue and changing consumer behaviors.” The upcoming increase in reported album-equivalent sales continues music streaming’s two-decade ascent to become a defining force on the charts, beginning with its first inclusion on the Hot 100 in 2007, before the global launch of Spotify. The Billboard 200 and other album charts began factoring in streams in 2014, and in 2018 increased the relative weight of paid/subscription streams. The most recent change occurred in 2020, when the magazine added video streams from services like YouTube to its accounting.

Read Billboard’s announcement here.