Billboard Makes New Chart Rules, Delete Merchandise Bundles

Screenshot of Billboard chart

JAKARTA - Billboard will make changes to the rules for the Billboard 200, Hot 100 and other album and song charts. The announcement made today, July 14th, comes as they try to fix how sales are calculated with respect to album bundles.

Album bundles are album sales along with merchandise and concert tickets, as well as instant digital sales attached to physical album purchases received at a later date. All of this is done to increase sales.

Under the new rules, Billboard will remove album bundle counts on its albums and charts entirely. Read the full Billboard report here.

The rule also states, albums bundled with any kind of additional music merchandise "promoted in addition to" count towards the official charts.

Furthermore, sales of physical albums or singles bundled with digital downloads will no longer count as digital sales, only count towards the chart once a physical copy is shipped.

According to Billboard, this change was made to address concerns that the chart does not reflect consumer purchase intentions as well as an equalizer for all artists.

In January, Billboard announced three major changes to its bundling rules, including a requirement that merchandise sold separately be cheaper than the bundle included in the album.

Today's announcement replaces these previously implemented rules, Billboard now says the measures fail to achieve their intended goal of accurately reflecting consumer intentions.

However, the start date for these new guidelines has not been announced.