Weekly Register: Revamped Chart Debuts

Craig Wayne Boyd. Photo: Trae Patton/NBC

The updated Billboard 200 albums chart debuted this week. The new version takes into account album sales, on-demand streaming and digital track sales. This formula is designed to represent total album activity and more accurately reflect consumption, instead of only including album purchases. Details here.

The formula is:
album sales + TEA (defined as 10 tracks = one album) + streaming activity (defined as total streams divided by 1500) = total activity

Even without the boost from streams of her newest album 1989 (which has been withheld from streaming sites), Taylor Swift landed at No. 1 on the new Top 200, with total activity of 339K.

Black Friday shopping gave a 33 percent increase to all-genre album sales, totaling more than 7 million units. By comparison, the same week last year experienced a 62 percent jump, thanks to then-new releases by One Direction (546K) and Garth Brooks hits (164K).

Country album sales are up 46 percent week-over-week, selling 1 million units TW. Brooks stays put at No. 1 on the Country album chart with 63K, and 255K RTD in its third week. The methodology for the individual genre charts has not changed.

Top 5 Country Albums
Garth Brooks, Man Against Machine, 63K
Jason Aldean, Old Boots, New Dirt, 31K
Darius Rucker, Home For The Holidays, 30K
Sam Hunt, Montevallo, 26K
Miranda Lambert, Platinum, 26K

Tracks: Craig Wayne Boyd, the indie star from The Voice, has the top-selling country track this week, moving 46K of his version of “I Walk The Line.”

As we zoom to the end of 2014, sales stats are down across the board:
Total albums YTD -12.3 percent (222.297 million TY/ 253.563 million LY)
Country albums YTD -11 percent (28.551 million TY/ 32.091 million LY)

Total digital tracks YTD -12.6 percent (1.009 billion TY/ 1.155 billion LY)
Country tracks YTD -17.3 percent (125.7 million TY/ 151.8 million LY)

Info according to Nielsen Soundscan.