Back in the day, we’d buy music by going to the record store, browsing the CDs, trying them out before making our decision. The process is much simpler these days where we don’t even have to leave our house to buy music, or have to go to a music store. We can be riding the subway home and buy an album without having to leave our seats. Safe to say that the music landscape is changing. That being said, with the music landscape changing, how will features and services like music charts change and adapt with it? Well over in the UK, the Official Charts Company has announced that they will start including music streams in their Top 40 list.
If you’ve ditched your physical music collection for a catalog of 20 million plus streaming tracks, your playback habits will soon count in the official music charts. We knew that the Official Charts Company was planning to include music streams in its Top 40, but now we have a firm date: July 6th. Spotify, Deezer, Napster, O2 Tracks, Xbox Music, Sony’s Music Unlimited and rara will be asked to supply their streaming data, with 100 streams counting as the equivalent of one download or physical single purchase (if they’re played for more than 30 seconds). Radio 1 will be the first to feature your 100th playback of Blurred Lineson that date. UK music fans are embracing streaming music at a rapid pace: weekly streams rose from 100 million a week in January 2013 to 200 million in January 2014. We’re now up to 260 million, and already nine tracks have enjoyed more than one million streams in a week this year alone.
