Chart News: Streaming now included in UK album certifications

BPI’s Iconic Album Awards to Include Audio Streams

5th June 2015 – The BPI’s famous Platinum, Gold and Silver Awards Programme, which recognises achievement in respect of sales of albums, singles and long-form music video in the UK, is to include audio streaming data in its album certifications from this week. The first albums benefitting from the incorporation of streaming will be announced via BPI’s regular Friday Twitter update today from 3.30pm.

Singles certifications in the UK have included streaming plays since July 2014 and this announcement brings albums in line. The BPI Platinum, Gold and Silver Awards Programme will adopt the same approach and criteria that the Official Charts are using to calculate how streams contribute to an album’s sales performance.

The inclusion of this new data has been backdated to the beginning of 2015, resulting in a higher than usual number of titles this week receiving new or upgraded certifications, including albums by artists such as Nicki Minaj, Placebo and Fall Out Boy.

The move to include streaming plays in the BPI Awards for albums reflects a significant shift in the way music is consumed by fans – in 2014 some 14.8bn audio streams were served across platforms such as Spotify, Deezer, Google Play and Rdio, up by 98 percent on 2013’s total. Streaming accounted for 16.5% of industry revenue in 2014 and is expected to grow yet further in 2015, with over 475 million audio streams now taking place every week.

How the incorporation of streams is calculated

To reflect the difference in weight between streaming and purchasing, the BPI Platinum, Gold and Silver Awards Programme will utilise Official Charts Company data, which takes the 12 most-streamed tracks from the standard version of an album, with the top two songs down-weighted in line with the average of the rest. The total of these streams will be divided by 1,000 and added to the physical and digital sales of the album (the 1,000 ratio representing 100 streams as an equivalent for one track, and 10 tracks for one album).