Billboard made a huge change, which will begin next week, to its iconic sales chart by incorporating streaming data and tracking sales into the formula to determine rankings on its Top 200.

This renovation to the algorithm that Billboard relies on shows the transition of the record industry in recent years, where album sales have dropped by 13 percent this year alone, yet streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Beats Music continue to generate more revenue.

"We were always limited to the initial impulse, when somebody purchased an album," Billboard charts editor Silvio Pietroluongo said to The New York Times. "Now we have the ability to look at that engagement and gauge the popularity of an album over time."

Pietroluongo added the new charts will be unveiled Dec. 4 and paint a more accurate picture of the popularity of an album.

The new formula includes data from Nielsen's 1,500 SoundScan streaming sources, as well as "track equivalent albums," meaning that 10 or more total song downloads from one album is counted as an album purchase.

This change will hopefully fix the charts' problem of not being able to monitor well the issue of many popular, established groups like Coldplay or Linkin Park, who, once their albums reached No. 1 or 2 in their debut weeks, plummeted in sales the next several weeks.

This fine tuning by Billboard to follow the trends of how people are listening and purchasing music has been going on for the past few years. In 2013, when it added YouTube streaming data as a factor in its Hot 100 singles, Baauer's "Harlem Shake" surged up in the charts without download or CD sales.

This new amount of data could help artists and labels market better to radio stations and other outlets.

"It's been very difficult over the last two or three years to communicate the charts to radio stations," Daniel Glass, founder of Glassnote Records, said according to Rolling Stone. "I've been Scotch taping and Band-Aiding Shazam and Spotify, bringing in all this data for them. Now with this all-in-one streaming chart, it's a much truer reflection of how much is being consumed."

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