Been seeing this topic a lot more recently, and I think it’s an interesting conversation to be had.

I’ve seen some people suggest that one full album play through should equate to one album sale, but that gets tricky when you have so many people nowadays who don’t listen to full projects or listen on shuffle.

I will agree that the 1500 number is a tad outdated, but you also don’t want to make the number too too low or else it starts to get a bit ridiculous. Pure sales should always be king, especially with them back on the rise in the mainstream in recent years.

I think there’s a separate solution to be considered, where I think streams and sales should be tracked and counted entirely separate of each other, and reported separately on the charts. This would be the most transparent way of accurately measuring how much an album was streamed and how much an album sold.

The more serious and much larger issue here is pay-per-stream, but that’s an entirely separate conversation.

As time has progressed and streaming has become the #1 method of music consumption globally, what number of streams do you think should equal one album sale?

André 3000

there should be no such thing tbh

450.

1000 should be better imo

at least 2

this is why stream are a fraudulent stat

they just pulled these metrics out their ass

The number is really irrelevant because everything would just move relatively up or down

its technically not 1500 now

1250 on a subscription service
3750 free streams

"Album equivalent units" are company scrip for artists and keeping up appearances for the industry.

They're streams, not sales.