ARIA to use streaming figures using a complicated formula for album chart for the first time

THE ARIA album chart is changing to reflect how music is now purchased. However, the formula to use streaming figures, is complicated.

THE Australian album chart is about to change forever.

ARIA will now include data from streaming services as well as physical sales and digital downloads to compile Australia’s most popular albums each week.

The adoption of the new technology will take place from Sunday, May 14.

Major territories including the US and UK already factor in plays on streaming services when they calculate the Top 100 albums each week.

“The ARIA chart is where people come to see what Australia is listening to,” ARIA CEO Dan Rosen said. “More and more Australians are listening to music via streaming so the ARIA chart needs to reflect that.”

The ARIA singles chart already factors in streams of tracks from Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer and Google Play to work out the Top 100 each week — using data from both paid and free subscribers.

Ed Sheeran is the king of streaming and the ARIA album chart will reflect that.

ARIA will use the same ratio for the albums chart as it does the singles chart — 175 streams counts as one stream.

It’s a complicated equation. Listeners don’t need to stream an entire album, with ARIA using data compiled from streams of 10 tracks of one album.

Rosen uses Ed Sheeran’s chart dominating album ÷ (Divide) as an example.

“There’s 15 songs on the Ed Sheeran album. You take the top 10 songs from that album in terms of streaming numbers, you take out the top two which would probably be Shape Of You and Galway Girl so the album chart isn’t skewed by a big hit single. You take the average of the next eight tracks, put two back in and divide the 10 songs by 175. Then you add in the physical and digital sales.”

ARIA have been running a test chart for a year to see what impact streaming would have on the turnover of albums and also the steady influx of new releases.

Many believe the use of streaming in the singles chart has meant songs spend longer at No. 1 — Ed Sheeran’s Shape Of You just smashed ABBA’s 31-year-old record by clocking up 15 weeks on top.

“Certain artists do better on streaming services than others but the test chart wasn’t massively different,” Rosen said. “It hasn’t been as big an issue as we thought. It was one of the reasons we waited, we didn’t want this to unfairly prejudice Australian artists and the model we’re implementing is the best possible model to ensure Australian artists have the best chance of success on the chart.”

Streaming will now also be used to calculate gold (35,000 sales) and platinum (70,000) certificates and will count for all genres.

This graph explains how streaming is factored into the album chart

Dan Rosen said the album chart will hardly change. Picture: Christian Gilles

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Originally published as ARIA to use streaming figures using a complicated formula for album chart for the first time