Post by nikkib on Nov 18, 2011 5:28:37 GMT 1
Lady Gaga, Rihanna & Others Suffer Due To New Billboard Chart Policy
Effective November 21st 2011, any albums priced below $3.49 during their month of release will be refused entry onto the Billboard 200.
In an official statement released by the company it stated:
Free or almost-free albums don’t represent a marketplace.
Whether you work with or are a fan of Madonna or Kenny Chesney, Lady Gaga or Coldplay, it is your faith in our efforts to keep our charts credible that we work to honor every day.
Ultimately, what swayed us to make a rule change now was the fact that we wouldn’t want an album that sold for one penny to count on our charts. Our charts are meant to indicate consumer intent.
And once you accept that you don’t want to count penny albums, the only remaining question is simply where a threshold should be.
Unit sales for Albums priced below $3.49 during their first four weeks of release will not be eligible for inclusion on the Billboard album charts and will not count towards sales data presented by Nielsen SoundScan.
In May of this year, Gaga’s third album ‘Born This Way’ debuted with sales of 1,108,000 but only because 440,000 copies had been sold by Amazon for an astounding $.099.
Had the project been released after the implementation of this new policy, it still would have been No.1 week but would have sold 664,000 as opposed to 1 million copies.
However, all sales generated by Rihanna’s ‘Rated R‘ (including those sold at discount) would still be counted as the lowest available price for that album was $3.99, 50 cents over the newly introduced policy.
Source
Effective November 21st 2011, any albums priced below $3.49 during their month of release will be refused entry onto the Billboard 200.
In an official statement released by the company it stated:
Free or almost-free albums don’t represent a marketplace.
Whether you work with or are a fan of Madonna or Kenny Chesney, Lady Gaga or Coldplay, it is your faith in our efforts to keep our charts credible that we work to honor every day.
Ultimately, what swayed us to make a rule change now was the fact that we wouldn’t want an album that sold for one penny to count on our charts. Our charts are meant to indicate consumer intent.
And once you accept that you don’t want to count penny albums, the only remaining question is simply where a threshold should be.
Unit sales for Albums priced below $3.49 during their first four weeks of release will not be eligible for inclusion on the Billboard album charts and will not count towards sales data presented by Nielsen SoundScan.
In May of this year, Gaga’s third album ‘Born This Way’ debuted with sales of 1,108,000 but only because 440,000 copies had been sold by Amazon for an astounding $.099.
Had the project been released after the implementation of this new policy, it still would have been No.1 week but would have sold 664,000 as opposed to 1 million copies.
However, all sales generated by Rihanna’s ‘Rated R‘ (including those sold at discount) would still be counted as the lowest available price for that album was $3.99, 50 cents over the newly introduced policy.
Source