The UK Album Chart will begin counting video streams from the first week of 2023.
The move has been introduced by the Official Charts Company to take into account the increasing variety of ways in which people consume music. The change was discussed for several months by the Chart Supervisory Committee, which comprises representatives of record labels, retailers and digital services from across the industry.
Video streams will be treated the same as audio streams. The streams will feed into the SEA-2 methodology, which is designed to calculate the overall popularity of an album and prevent viral tracks or videos from skewing the album charts. The method, which has been in use since February 2015, aggregates the streams of an album’s top 16 most streamed tracks and neutralises the top two tracks to the average of the other 14. The total is then divided by 1,000 and counted as one album stream.
Video streams have been counted in the singles chart since 2018. At the time, there was a consensus that video streams could skew the overall charting of albums because videos are usually played separately to full albums.
However, the Charts Supervisory Committee has since altered its stance, believing that videos are now more comprehensively integrated within the album listening experience. Video streams now account for 6.7 per cent of total music consumption in the streaming market.
Charlotte De Burgh-Holder, Official Charts chair, said: “As the music market evolves, so too does the way we measure success. Official Charts have always set the gold standard for chart compilation, and their addition of video to the albums chart reflects their dedication to always having the clearest picture of how the UK consumes their favourite music.”
In other chart news, Michael Buble recently joked that Christmas should be cancelled if Lewis Capaldi doesn’t get this year’s festive Number One with his song ‘Pointless’.
The post Video streams to count towards UK Album Chart from next year appeared first on NME.
