YouTube Views No Longer Count In Billboard Charts, And That’s Just Fine

Ever since streaming came along, figuring out how something charts on Billboard has been anything but clean. Before streaming, a sale of a CD or vinyl record was a sale, but until recently, 1,500 paid streams counted as 1 sale. In January, Billboard changed the ratio so that 1,000 paid streams equals 1 album sale, while 2,500 ad-supported streams would also equal 1 sale. Seems reasonable, right?

Well, not to YouTube, who argued that a stream is a stream is a stream, and wanted each free, ad-supported stream to be weighted the same as a paid one.

When Billboard refused to accept this demand, YouTube pulled it’s data from the Billboard charts.

Two Ways To Look At It

You can look at this from two angles, both of which make sense depending upon where an artist is in the industry food chain.

The first is that Billboard charts don’t mean much anymore to anyone except record labels, who use the charts to keep score with other labels.

It’s no longer a big deal to make the #1, the top 10, top 40 or even top 200 like it once was. The ranking doesn’t move the needle with fans, and the general media doesn’t even pay attention.

If you’re an indie artist you could care less about the charts (since you’re not likely to rank anyway), but if you’re a label artist this is something you do pay attention to. You’re in the label system so you’re keeping score (or someone else at the label is) as well.

The Indie Perspective

If you’re an indie artist YouTube is way more important than Billboard. YouTube has more users than any other streaming service, so it doesn’t matter if a view is free or paid. All you care about as an artist is that someone watched or listened.

A chart position might be nice, but I bet you’ll be a lot more excited if a track has 10 million views/streams!

It should be noted that whether a stream on YouTube is audio-only or a video view, it still counts as a view.

As far as YouTube’s payout per stream, you’ll see numbers that are all over the place, from as little as $0.001 to $0.025. The reason why the true figure is so hard to pin down is that:

• it depends on how many streams come from the free tier versus paid (paid pays more)

• which country most of the streams come from (countries where the subscription fee is low will pay less per stream

• for ad-supported, the time of year makes a difference (the holiday season generally pays more than Februrary)

• for ad-supported, the type of advertiser makes a difference (Mercedes will pay more than Target, for instance)

Still, you’re getting paid at least something for being on YouTube, while if you chart in Billboard the best you can hope for is that the label marketing team will go, “We might have a hit here. Let’s get behind it!”

So again, two different ways of looking at this. Ultimately a Billboard chart means a lot less if it can’t aggregate the data from all the different platforms that a song plays on, but in the end, it probably doesn’t matter much anyway.