Germany is accepting streams for its Album chart
Joining other territories like Sweden, the US and UK, Germany will now include audio streams in its weekly BVMI/GfK Album chart, from tomorrow.
Announced by the German charts’ official gatherer and publisher GfK Entertainment, the rules for the chart update are stricter and more complicated than those used in the US and UK.
One of the regulations is that only premium interactive audio streams will be accepted. Meaning, tracks streamed using Spotify or Apple Music’s radio formats won’t count, and neither will streams played via Spotify’s free ad-supported tier.
Unlike calculations here in Australia or in the US, where it’s unit-based, Germany’s charts are value-based on retail performance sales of albums as well as the number of sales.
Because of this, GfK will work out the value of each stream per week using a rather complex formula.GfK willfirst multiply the number of premium accountsby the average value of premium subscriptions. That number is then divided by the number of streams by premium account holders in a given week.
Following that, the two most popular tracks from each album are down-weighted and the sum of all streams on the album are divided by 10 and multiplied by 12.
See GfK’s English translated formula below, courtesy MBW.
Dr. Florian pressures, CEO of BVMI said streaming achieved a new record over the past year as it now accounts for almost 14% of sales in Germany.
Dr. Mathias Giloth, Managing Director GfK Entertainment said in a statement: “At theend of 2015 we were counting up to 100 million music streams in Germany every day – twice as many as last year. Given these figures, the streaming integration is the logical consequence in the official German album charts.”
The news follows an update to the US’ Gold and Platinum certifications. This week the RIAA announced it is now accepting on-demand audio and video streams to contribute to the two certifications. Vance Joy was among 17 artists to benefit from the update with his 2014-released debut albumDream Your Life Away now Gold in the US, with 500,000 sales.
The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has been accepting streams for songs since November 2014. On November 24 2014 ARIA merged the singles streaming chart with the sales chart, using a secret weighting method which was agreed upon by its members.
Online digital downloads have been accepted into the official German charts since 2004 and the territory has had a Streaming Chart since 2012.
The following streaming providers send their data to GfK Entertainment: Apple Music, Deezer, Google Play Music, Juke, Microsoft Groove, Napster, Qobuz, Spotify and WiMP / Tidal.
The first official German Albums chart to include audio streams will be released next Friday.