Valence Media To Acquire Nielsen Music

Billboard parent company Valence Media is acquiring the Nielsen Music insights and product suite that fuel its charts data, it was announced Wednesday. The purchase reunites Billboard with the leading music consumption analytics platform after a decade-long separation.

Nielsen Music -- formerly Nielsen SoundScan -- was created in 1991 by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett and has provided the Billboard charts with consumption insights on sales, downloads and streams since then, fueling the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard 200, Billboard Artist 100 and many other top genre and airplay tallies. Billboard and Nielsen were under the same ownership from 1999-2009, the Dutch media conglomerate Verenigde Nederlandse Uitgeverijen. (VNU acquired Billboard in 1994 and Nielsen in 1999.) In 2007 VNU changed its name to Nielsen and two years later sold Billboard to e5 Global Media Holdings, which became Prometheus Global Media under Guggenheim Digital Media. Billboard has operated under Valence Media since 2018.

Financial terms of the deal between Valence Media and Nielsen were not disclosed.

With the new acquisition, Valence -- which operates dick clark productions, Billboard-The Hollywood Reporter Media Group, MRC Film, MRC Television and MRC Non-Fiction -- has established a new MRC Data division that will be led by current Billboard-The Hollywood Reporter Media Group president Deanna Brown.

"By bringing Nielsen Music Products and Billboard back together, we're answering the request from the music industry for a more coordinated, powerful, agile and global suite of independent measurement products," said Brown in a statement. "The new MRC Data division will leverage our scale and global, multimedia perspective to operate as a true accelerant for our music business colleagues and stakeholders."

Under this new arrangement, MRC promises to continue improving upon Nielsen Music's consumption data by leveraging relationships with digital streaming providers, investing in technological upgrades and reevaluating proprietary methodologies.

The Nielsen Music products included in the deal are the Music Connect analytics platform and API that provides music streaming, airplay and sales data for artists, albums and songs; Broadcast Data Systems that offers streaming, sales and airplay data at national and local market levels in the U.S. and Canada; and Music 360 music research and insights reports, which offer consumer trends impacting the industry.