That’s How Many Streams It Takes to Equal an Album’s Sale
When was the last time you bought an album? For many of us, this is probably ancient history. Taylor Swift’s Midnights is $12.99 per CD ( $29.99 for vinyl ) when you could spend less on an Apple Music subscription and listen to millions of songs instead. But the question is, how many times do you actually need to stream an album for it to be worth selling?
Before, the math was pretty simple. The industry considered selling three singles the equivalent of selling one album . So, count the number of singles sold, divide by three and add to the number of albums sold. Light.
Of course, the industry itself soon changed rapidly as digital music entered the scene. Illegal downloads brought about rapid changes, and Apple’s iTunes was ready to take advantage of this. Consumers now had an easy way to buy not only albums on their computers, but also individual songs. You didn’t have to shell out $10 or $20 to buy a whole CD of the song you liked: you could just buy the song for 99 cents.
Now, the only thing more convenient than buying music instantly is free music . Ad-supported streaming meant that people could listen to whatever they wanted without spending a dime, as long as they dealt with ads from time to time. Paid subscriptions offered better quality music without ads for the price of one album. Whether you pay for it with money or ads, you now have access to almost any song you want, at any time. People still buy music, of course. Vinyl sales are solid and even CDs have a moment, but no one argues that streaming is currently a source of income.
How many streams equals one album sale?
There has to be some sort of standard to account for all the different ways that people consume music today, and that standard is a unit equivalent to an album. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) standard defines it as follows: A single album sale equals 10 song downloads or 1,500 song streaming sessions . This is the formula they use to determine when albums reach Gold (500,000 copies), Platinum (1,000,000 copies), Multi-Platinum (2,000,000 copies) and Diamond (10,000,000 copies).
Although the RIAA has not been the only one to use this standard for many years, times have changed . Billboard and Nielsen are now looking at the difference between paid streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music and ad-supported tiers like Spotify free or YouTube. They then break down the streaming services as follows: 1,250 premium audio streams , 3,750 ad-supported streams, or 3,750 video streams equals the sale of one album .
So, the next time you watch an artist’s music video on YouTube, you’ll “buy” 1/3750 of the album for them. When you stream a track on Apple Music, it’s 1/1250 or 1/1500 album units, depending on who’s counting.
Let’s do the math. Midnights (3am Edition) consists of 20 tracks. Based on Billboard measurements, it would take 62.5 full streams on a paid platform like Apple Music to sell one album. To get out of the RIAA, you need to listen to it 75 times. Since the album is an hour and nine minutes long, that’s 72 or 86 hours of listening when a single $12.99 purchase would do the same. Of course, if you’re using an ad-supported service, that’s even more: 187.5 plays or over 215 hours of your time, and that’s not including ads!
Thus, it becomes obvious why an artist like Taylor Swift uses all possible marketing tactics to get fans to buy copies of her albums. It takes someone a second to pay for a CD, but dozens, if not hundreds of hours, to broadcast a “sale”. The creation of Midnights as a clock, which requires four copies of the album to complete, means a fourfold increase in sales to the most dedicated fans. Why wait until 860 hours of streaming when you can sell four albums at once?
But hey, this clearly works for Taylor. With ” Midnights “, Taylor Swift became the first artist in Billboard history to hit the top ten in a single week , with four other tracks rounding out the top twenty. actual record. This award goes to Adele, whose album 25 opened with 3.482 million copies.
As of this writing, Anti-Hero is still number one, and Drake doesn’t lose sight of that fact . While his new music has taken places from two to nine in the top ten, Taylor Swift’s most popular track still wins. In an Instagram post celebrating his success, he covered her spot with an emoji, while not covering 10th place for Sam Smith and Unholy ‘s Kim Petras.
Drama aside, these artists know how to use these album units to push their numbers to levels almost never seen before. The Beatless shipped 3.2 million copies of Let It Be in 13 days , while Taylor Swift sold three million albums worldwide in the first week of Midnights , for over one billion global streams. Whether these streams came from premium or ad-supported services, it all adds up to a lot of albums.