Free Republic

In what the music biz sees as a long overdue move, Nielsen SoundScan and its client Billboard will soon implement radical changes in the way album sales are calculated for the weekly chart that remains a key metric of an artist’s popularity. Beginning with the album chart that will be published Dec. 3 (covering sales for the week ending Nov. 30, which climaxes with retail’s Black Friday), music streams from services like Spotify and Beats Music will be tabulated as part of the data employed to rank the nation’s most popular albums. SoundScan will equate 1,500 song streams as the...

U.S. album sales hit 3.97-million last week, the smallest weekly total for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan first began tracking data in 1991, Billboard's Ed Christman and Glenn Peoples report. It's also the first time during that period that weekly sales have fallen below 4 million, they write.Sales for the week ending August 25 fell 18.6%. The best seller was rapper Whiz Khalifa's "Blacc Hollywood" which debuted with 90,000 units, Billboard says. For the first time in more than a year,  sales for the soundtrack to Disney's "Frozen" fell below 100,000 units.CD sales have practically vanished, down 19.2% year-over-year, with sales at...

With over 24.3 million digital tracks sold to date, Taylor Swift is the top-selling digital artist in music history, according to sales figures released yesterday by Nielsen SoundScan. In addition, her FEARLESS album was 2009’s top-seller, with sales last year in excess of 3.2 million copies, and Taylor claimed both the #1 and #2 positions atop Nielsen’s BDS Top 10 Most Played Songs chart (all genres), with “You Belong With Me” and “Love Story,” respectively. She also topped the all format 2009 Top 10 Artist Airplay chart with over 1.29 million song detections, and the Top 10 Artist Internet Streams...