News

Dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the music industry may finally be settling into an uneasy acceptance that its market and business model have changed. Only two months after the successful launch of Apple's iTunes Music Store, Billboard magazine announced that it would begin accounting for downloads in its weekly music rankings.

On July 2, the popular music journal began to include data from downloads in its Billboard music rankings. Based on sales information gathered by Nielsen SoundScan, Billboard's charts have long been the standard that measured the popularity of any recording. The move to include legitimate downloads with retail sales is a sea change for the music industry, and an acknowledgement that its business model is evolving beyond its traditional base of retail record stores.

The new Billboard charts will include combined sales from the Internet and from brick-and-mortar retailers, and will feature a separate chart for Internet-only sales, both singles and albums. SoundScan won't count downloads from free file-sharing services such as Kazaa and Morpheus, but only those sold by authorized Internet services: the iTunes Music Store; Listen.com Inc.; MusicNet; Liquid Audio; Roxio Inc.'s pressplay; and America Online.

Only those tunes purchased and downloaded permanently will be counted, according to the announcement. "Streamed" recordings included as part of monthly music service subscription fees won't be counted, even though such statistics could be useful to music marketers. Music industry executives are said to be eager to see the data for online sales. At the very least, the inclusion of such data in Billboard's charts bestows a new respectability on Internet music.

Some analysts believe that SoundScan's Internet tracking could ultimately alter the music industry's approach to launching new talents—such as debuting them with single songs rather than entire albums. In that sense, Internet music could bring the industry full circle, back to its original agenda of selling individual songs. As Internet users have known for years, debuting new artists on the Web would sharply reduce the costs of "breaking" them to the public.