With the prevalence (and popularity) of streaming among music lovers and considering its impact on record sales, Billboard has announced that it will be implementing an industry-shaking change on how it computes the weekly album charts.

Billboard, together with Nielsen SoundScan, the agency that takes charge of the figures, will include streams and downloads of tracks when determining which album makes it to the Billboard 200.

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Billboard has been the music world's weekly scorecard since 1956.

This is the first time since 1991 that the magazine will introduce change to its system. In 1991, the magazine started using hard sales data from SoundScan, which then hailed as a revolutionary change in the music industry, which used to base its charts on questionable surveys of record stores.

Billboard's brand new chart will start including both record sales and listening from Monday to Nov. 30, with the results to be revealed Dec. 4 and printed on its Dec. 13 issue.

Billboard's chart director Silvio Pietroluongo was enthusiastic that the inclusion of streams with the sales record will make the charts reveal what's realistic and really the taste of listeners.

"We were always limited to the initial impulse, when somebody purchased an album," Pietroluongo said in an interview.

"Now we have the ability to look at that engagement and gauge the popularity of an album over time," he continued.

The launching of streaming music services, including Spotify, have already altered the music industry.

But how will SoundScan and Billboard count steams?

For every 1,500 song streams from the likes Spotify, Beats Music, Rdio, Rhapsody and Google Play, SoundScan will consider it as equivalent to one album sale.

Billboard will also count "track equivalent albums",  which equates 10 downloads as one album.

Likewise, Nielsen will also start providing streaming data, which will also be used for the weekly charts.

TagsBillboard, nielsen soundscan