Report: 'Billboard' Pressured To Revise Bundling Rules

The use of so-called album bundles — tacking a download or CD to another purchase — is an age-old sales gimmick in the music industry, but now it’s everywhere. And Billboard magazine is under pressure to change the bundling rules used to compile its charts, according to The NYTimes.

Billboard, whose charts are widely accepted as the last word in measuring the popularity of songs and albums, acknowledges the problem. It plans to announce this year that it will tighten the rules on merchandise bundling, said Deanna Brown, the president of the Billboard-Hollywood Reporter Media Group, a division of Valence Media.

The rise of album bundles may be a response to the explosive growth of streaming and the rapid decline of album sales. From 2015 to 2018, revenue from album downloads plunged by about 53 percent in the United States and CD sales fell by 52 percent, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Over the same period, streaming revenue more than tripled.

But the formulas that Billboard and Nielsen, its data partner, have adopted to reconcile the many ways that people consume music today have given artists and their marketers an incentive to push downloads and CDs, despite most fans’ preference for streaming. When it comes to the charts, each album a fan acquires — by itself or when tacked on to the purchase of a ticket or T-shirt — is worth about 1,400 times as much as any individual stream.

Billboard has said it is still deciding how to revise its bundling rules, and has held a series of industry meetings in recent months on the matter. Many of those have involved major-label record executives, who tend to favor bundles as an essential marketing technique as well as a chart strategy.