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YouTube is Pull her data from the bulletin board For use in the publisher’s industry-leading US music charts. The decision comes in response to what happened recently It changes Billboard has built its own ratings formula, which continues to add more weight to paid on-demand streaming than free, ad-supported streaming.
Billboard justified its decision to modify its old formula by saying that the change “will better reflect an increase in streaming revenue and changing consumer behaviors.”
In other words, streaming is now more important than buying albums or songs, so it wants its charts to reflect that.
However, YouTube doesn’t like the new formula because it doesn’t want there to be much — if any — distinction between free and paid streams, especially if the changes are meant to reflect how consumers enjoy music today.
“Billboard uses an outdated formula that weights subscription-supported streams higher than ad-supported. This does not reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the tremendous engagement from fans who don’t have a subscription,” a YouTube blog post shared Wednesday. He explains. “Streaming is the primary way people experience music; constitute 84% of recorded music revenues in the United States.”
“We are simply asking that every stream be counted fairly and equally, whether subscription-based or ad-supported – because every fan matters and every play should count,” the post notes.
The ranking changes will be reflected starting with the charts published on January 17, which will include data from January 2-8, 2026. This will affect the Billboard 200 and genre-based album charts. Additionally, the ratio between paid/subscription streaming levels and ad-supported on-demand streaming levels will be adjusted to 2.5:1 for the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard said.
To protest the new formula, YouTube said it would not submit data to Billboard after January 16, 2026.
Here’s what the change means in practice: Under the revised calculation, Billboard said ad-supported on-demand song streams are 33.3% lower than album, and paid/subscription on-demand song streams are 20% lower than album, to equal an album unit. In short, it will take fewer streams than before for an album to climb the charts. This is a win for streaming in general but not necessarily for YouTube.
This is why. Nowadays, the formula used by Billboard defines an album unit (the standard measure for chart rankings) as the sale of one album. It also counts the 10 singles from the album as one unit of album consumption.
On the streaming side, it currently says one album unit equals 3,750 ad-supported streams – like YouTube – or 1,250 official paid/subscription audio and video streams.
After the changes, these numbers will be adjusted, so it will take 2,500 ad-supported streams or 1,000 paid/subscription streams to count as one album unit. This means that paid streams count 2.5x as much as ad-supported streams. Although this gap is lower than the current 3:1 ratio, it’s still not what YouTube would prefer to see here. The company basically does what companies do in failed negotiations like this: It takes the ball and goes home.
Of course, by not cooperating with Billboard, YouTube Music data will not be taken into account in chart rankings, which may prompt labels and artists to deprioritize publishing their music on YouTube. This is not a good long-term strategy for YouTube as an important player in the era of streaming music. For this reason, this step should be viewed as a negotiation tactic.
“We are committed to achieving fair representation across the charts and hope we can work with Billboard to return to their charts,” the YouTube announcement concludes.