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Billboard reveals US chart plans ahead of global release day
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 26 June 2015
Billboard has confirmed that its chart tracking week will change next month to fall in line with the all new global release day, aka Friday. Or New Music Fridays if you prefer. I don’t.
As with the UK, American new releases will have to shift from early week (Tuesday in the case of the US) to end-of-week to fall in line with the new global initiative. To bring the charts in line, Billboard and their partners Nielsen Music will now start tracking sales and streams on a Friday to Thursday basis, rather than the current Monday to Sunday. Though for Billboard’s radio airplay charts, monitoring will continue as Monday though Sunday.
In terms of when the Billboard charts go live, this is shifting to Tuesday instead of Thursday, the American charts always taking a little longer to be processed and published than here in the UK. And whereas the UK Official Charts Company will make its shift to a new chart tracking schedule via a short chart week, the US record industry will have a long chart week before the new system properly kicks into action.
As previously reported, New Music Fridays kicks off on 10 Jul, and you’ll find more info at newmusicfridays.com. Which interestingly is a domain name that was registered in July last year, back when the idea of a global release day was a mere concept and months of “consultation” was still to occur on which day to go with. So, someone was organised. Though not as organised as Sony Music UK, which registered newmusicfriday.com back in 2003. Now that’s forward thinking. Though you’d think they’d now point it to the official global release day site.
