Album-equivalent unit

Album sales more than halved from 1999 to 2009, declining from a $14.6 to $6.3 billion industry,[4] partly due to cheap digitally downloaded singles.

[5] For instance, the only albums that went platinum in the United States in 2014 were the Frozen soundtrack and Taylor Swift's 1989, whereas several artists' works had in 2013.

[8] The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have used album-equivalent unit to measure their Global Recording Artist of the Year since 2013.

[9] The term album-equivalent unit had been used by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) long before the streaming era began.

Between 1994 and 2005, the IFPI counted three physical singles as an equivalent of one album unit in their annual Recording Industry in Numbers (RIN) report.

With this overhaul, the Billboard 200 includes on-demand streaming and digital track sales (as measured by Nielsen SoundScan) by way of a new algorithm, using data from all of the major on-demand audio subscription services including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, YouTube and formerly Xbox Music.

[14] Similarly the Recording Industry Association of America, which had previously certified albums based on units sold to retail stores, began factoring streaming for their certifications in February 2016.

Similar to the UK chart rule, the actual streams of the top-two songs are not counted, but instead the average of the following tracks.

"[26] Physical albums have mostly turned into collectors' items as noted by a 2016 poll by ICM Research, which found that nearly half of the surveyed people did not listen to the record they bought.