Rolling Stones article.... it seems Billboard will be changing the rules on how it weighs music from different services, giving more weight to paid streaming services, as opposed to those where people get their music for free, like Youtube or Spotify....
Quote:But all this could change next year, due to a shift in the way Billboard plans to track its charts. The Hot 100 has three components – sales, radio play and streaming – and starting in 2018, Billboard will give more weight to streams from platforms that listeners pay for, discounting the impacts of YouTube, the largest music-streaming site in the world, and the free (or ad-supported) tier of Spotify. Paid streams will also count more on the Billboard 200, which tracks the most popular albums in the country each week.
Quote: A recent report from the Recording Industry Association of America suggested that Apple pays an artist between $12 and $15 per 1,000 streams, while Spotify pays roughly $7 and YouTube pays approximately $1. YouTube also relies on the shelter of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow users to post content that they don't own the rights to.
