New Billboard Pricing Policy

[Brian Quinn]

Billboard Pricing Policy, Effective November 21, 2011
November 15, 2011
By Billboard staff

Unit sales for Albums priced below $3.49 during their first four weeks of release will not be eligible for inclusion on the Billboard album charts and will not count towards sales data presented by Nielsen SoundScan.
*The rule also applies to reissued titles.
*New Holiday/Seasonal titles must meet the minimum threshold through the final week of the calendar year.
*Unit sales for albums or EPs with 8 or less tracks will not be eligible for charting if the retail price is less than the sum of the tracks on the release, multiplied by $0.39.
*Minimum pricing for a multi-disc album (not a single disc with extra tracks), where the extra disc is audio content, will be $3.49 times the amount of discs being made available.
*For digital-only deluxe editions, any extra content exceeding nine tracks would be considered the equivalent of an extra disc. Each additional 10 tracks thereafter would be the equivalent of an additional disc.

Unit sales for Digital Tracks priced below $0.39 during their first three months of release will not be eligible for inclusion on Billboard's digital songs charts.

If a retailer offering a title for less than the above stated prices is a daily reporter to Nielsen SoundScan, units will be removed for charting purposes solely for the dates in which the title was priced less than the minimum.
*If a title was priced under the minimum during a portion of the day, all sales for that title on that day will not count towards the Billboard charts unless accurate transaction data for that title during the specific sales hours can be provided to Nielsen SoundScan for verification.

If a retailer offering a title for less than the above stated prices is a weekly reporter to Nielsen SoundScan, all units for that title sold by the retailer in the week will be removed for charting purposes unless accurate transaction data for that title on the sale date(s) can be provided to Nielsen SoundScan for verification .

Please note that the minimum pricing rule would not apply to any store-wide music liquidation sales.

Brian

[Brian Quinn]

Billboard has lifted a ban on including catalogue tracks on the Hot 100, which has allowed several Whitney Houston tracks to re-enter this week.

Previously catalogue or recurrent tracks were not allowed to appear in the Hot 100, irrespective of their sales or airplay performance, so freeing up space for contemporary releases. But, with a number of Houston’s s tracks selling very strongly on download in the wake of her death, Billboard has decided to re-write the chart rules so if a catalogue track has sold enough copies to appear in the Top 50 of the chart it will now be allowed to do so.


As a result I Will Always Love You, which originally spent a record 14 weeks at number one between 1992 and 1993, re-enters at number seven after selling 195,000 downloads, while 1987 chart-topper I Wanna Dance With Somebody returns at 35 and Greatest Love Of All at 41. There is a good chance they will be joined by other Houston titles next week as sales for this week’s Hot 100 only went up to last Sunday, the day it was announced she had died aged 48.

This is not the first time Billboard has changed its chart rules as a result of the death of a big star. It ran into controversy when Michael Jackson died in June 2009 as rules then in place for the Billboard 200 albums chart excluded albums two or more years old from charting once they had dropped out. This meant a number of Jackson titles were not listed. These included the retrospective Number Ones, which was the biggest-selling album in the US in the wake of Jackson’s death but was not listed on the main albums chart because it was a catalogue title. That November the rules were re-written so all albums became eligible for the Billboard 200 chart, however old.

Brian

[King Of The Whole World]

I guess with the rules changing in the catalogue department that could help Elvis too with some of his old releases. I guess when Billboard receives a lot of grief about something they DO change the rules. We need to create some headaches for Elvis' injustices.