Top Album Sales is a

music chart A record chart, in the music industry, also called a music chart, is a ranking of Sound recording and reproduction, recorded music according to certain criteria during a given period. Many different criteria are used in worldwide charts, often ...

published by ''

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...

'' magazine starting in December 2014. It is a weekly chart documenting the best-selling albums on a weekly basis in the United States. Up until December 2014, this had been documented by the ''Billboard'' 200 chart, but that chart was altered to factor in

music streaming A music streaming service is a type of streaming media service that focuses primarily on music, and sometimes other forms of digital audio content such as podcasts. These services are usually subscription-based services allowing users to stream d ...

by accounting for

album-equivalent units The album-equivalent unit, or album equivalent, is a measurement unit in music industry to define the consumption of music that equals the purchase of one album copy. This consumption includes streaming and song downloads in addition to traditi ...

in its tallies to document the effect of the rise of music streaming outlets such as

Apple Music Apple Music is a music, audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on-demand, or they can listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the Internet radio stations Apple M ...

and

Spotify Spotify (; ) is a proprietary Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. It is one of the largest music streaming service providers, with over 456 million monthly active us ...

. The Top Album Sales chart was created to preserve the older methodology of counting

pure album sales Record sales or music sales are activities related to selling music recordings (albums, singles, or music videos) through physical record shops or digital music store. Record sales reached the peak in 1999, when 600 million people spent an averag ...

List of number ones

References

{{Billboard Billboard charts