When was the last time you bought an album? For most of us, this probably dates back to ancient times. Taylor Swift’s Midnights album costs $12.99 on CD ($29.99 on record), whereas you can spend less on an Apple Music subscription and listen to millions of songs instead. But the question arises: How many times do you really need to listen to an album to make it worth selling?
In the past, the math was pretty simple. Industry considered selling 3 singles equivalent to selling an album. That is, divide the number of singles sold by three, then add to the number of albums sold. It was easy…
Of course, the industry itself has changed rapidly with the advent of digital music. Illegal downloads have caused rapid change, and Apple iTunes has also emerged to take advantage of it. Consumers now had an easy way to purchase not only albums but individual songs from their computers. You didn’t have to pay $10 or $20 to buy the whole CD for a song you loved: you could buy the song for just 99 cents.
Now, the only thing more convenient than buying music instantly is free music. Ad-supported streaming means people can listen to whatever they want without spending a dime. As long as they ignore some ads from time to time. Paid subscriptions offer ad-free higher quality music for the price of an album. Now you always have access to almost any song you want, whether you pay with money or ads. People still buy music, of course. Record sales are solid and even CDs are somehow alive, but it’s unquestionably streaming that’s making money right now.
There needs to be a standard to take into account that people consume music in different ways today, and that standard is the unit of album equivalent. The standard defined by the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) is as follows: One album sale equals 10 song downloads or 1,500 song streams. This is the formula they use to determine when albums reach Gold (500,000 units), Platinum (1,000,000 units), multi-Platinum (2,000,000 units), and Diamond (10,000,000 units).
The RIAA was not alone in using this standard for years, but times have changed. Billboard and Nielsen are now considering the difference between paid streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music and ad-supported tiers like Spotify free or YouTube. They then break down their streaming services as follows: 1,250 premium audio streams, 3,750 ad-supported streams, or 3,750 video streams equals one album sale.
So the next time you watch an artist’s music video on YouTube, you’re “buying” 1/3,750 of an album for him. When you listen to a track on Apple Music, that means 1/1,250 or 1/1,500 album units, depending on who’s counting.
Let’s do some calculations… Taylor Swift’s Midnights (3am Edition) album consists of 20 tracks. According to Billboard’s metrics, it takes 62.5 listens to equal an album sale on a paid platform like Apple Music. According to the RIAA’s measurements, it is necessary to listen 75 times. Since the album is 1 hour and 9 minutes long, that’s 72 or 86 hours of listening, while a $12.99 purchase would accomplish the same thing. Of course, if you’re using an ad-supported service, the time is even longer: you spend 187.5 hours listening, or over 215 hours, and that’s before you factor in the ads!
It’s clear, then, why an artist like Taylor Swift uses every possible marketing tactic to get fans to buy their album. It takes a second for someone to pay for a CD, but it takes tens or even hundreds of hours to deliver a “sale”. Designing Midnights as a watch that requires 4 copies of the album to complete means quadrupling sales from the most loyal fans. Why wait for up to 860 hours of broadcast when you can sell 4 albums at once?
But it obviously works for Swift. With Midnights, Taylor Swift became the first musician in Billboard history to hold the full top 10 in a single week. It opened with 1,578 million equivalent album units, which, while surprising, isn’t actually a record. This award goes to Adele, whose 25 albums opened with 3.482 million album units.
Artists know how to use these album unit numbers to take them to near-never-before-seen extremes. The Beatles sold 3.2 million copies of Let It Be in 13 days, while Taylor Swift managed to get 3 million album units worldwide in the first week of Midnights. Whether these streams come from premium or ad-supported services, they all mean lots of albums.
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