I remember how upset folks was when this news dropped.

The simple explanation is that YT Music audience counts any interaction with an artist over YT Music, YT videos and YT shorts. Kinda wild.

What are other misleading music/streaming metrics

Dare I say...

All of them

number of hoes scared

This the only metric I go by

Monthly listeners on Spotify right?

p****es sucked
the reported number for drake is way too low

Coolio

"Album equivalent unit"

Not a sale. All hokum from that point

obviously all of them but the one i was always especially confused and sceptical on is first week numbers

should count for more than a sale tbh

a sale is 1 person listening to the album

an AEU is 1,500 people

Misleading? I mean numbers can be manipulated to get them to say whatever you want them to say. Best not to be too concerned about it but of course in this day and age easier said than done

Statistics aren’t misleading, it’s about how they’re presented, especially in terms of context regarding what other datasets they’re presented alongside

Coming to conclusions using a single dataset or metric will always leave your answer unwhole

🤔

This is true but also numbers can be and are manipulated lol

Album equivalent numbers are such a farce. Just some random arbitrary number so that executives can feel better about themselves.

None of them

I already did this bit for MJ fans, but I like the parallel thinking

Hours stream

Anything that’s not buying an album is grossly inflated

Stats aren’t misleading on their own—it’s the context that matters. Looking at one metric by itself rarely tells the whole story.

Ever since I learned you can listen to each song for 30 seconds to count for album equivalent I abandoned all hope

I don't think yt music counts shorts, not sure tho

But music videos and songs make sense and both can be played through the music app (goated service) - and it counts worldwide for its overall stats although it does have stat slices you can look at too by country and city etc.

I also don't think there is a difference between premium and free users, I think they get counted the same, which Spotify counts free users as less than premium users

YB and 50 Cent run YouTube on average

First week sales is prob the most misleading tho tbh, it's also funny it wasn't taken as a big deal before the 2010s outside of record breaking (like 50 Cent fw or carter 3 fw)

I think the hyper focus on fw sales especially in the 2020s is a symptom of the short attention span and major "fast content" behavior that's been going on the last 8 or so years

In fact, it used to be a detriment from your label and they'd looked at you funny if you had a crazy first week but fell off the next month to the end of the year - looks worst that having a bad/average first week that then picks up as time goes on, or having a consistent number throughout the year

Now labels use fw as a marketing gimmick since that's what people randomly started to hyper fixate on