Album-equivalent units

Album-equivalent unit is a term in the music industry to indicate the consumption of music which equals the purchase of one album copy. This consumption includes streaming and song downloads, in addition to album sales. Album-equivalent unit was incorporated into record chart methodology following the decline of album sales in the 21st century. Album sales more than halved from 1999 to 2009, declining from a $14.6 to $6.3 billion industry. For instance, the only albums that went platinum in the United States in 2014 were the Frozen soundtrack and Taylor Swift's 1989, whereas several artists did in 2013. The usage of album-equivalent units revolutionized the charts from the "best-selling albums" ranking into the "most popular albums" ranking.

Beginning with the December 13, 2014 issue, the Billboard 200 albums chart revised its ranking methodology with album-equivalent unit instead of pure album sales. With this overhaul, the Billboard 200 includes on-demand streaming and digital track sales (as measured by Nielsen SoundScan) by way of a new algorithm, utilizing data from all of the major on-demand audio subscription services including Spotify, Beats Music, Google Play and Xbox Music. Known as TEA (track equivalent album) and SEA (streaming equivalent album), 10 song sales or 1,500 song streams from an album are treated as equivalent to one purchase of the album. Billboard continues to publish a pure album sales chart, called Top Album Sales, that maintains the traditional Billboard 200 methodology, based exclusively on SoundScan's sales data. Taylor Swift's 1989 was the first album to top the chart with this new methodology, generating 339,000 album-equivalent units (281,000 units came from pure album sales). On the February 8, 2015 issue, Now That's What I Call Music! 53 became the first album in history to miss the top position of the Billboard 200 despite being the best-selling album of the week.

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