Topic summary
Album equivalent units
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Album-equivalent unit.
Responses and criticism
According to Silvio Pietroluongo, vice president of charts and data development at Billboard, album equivalent units methodology "reflects album popularity in today's world, where music is accessible on so many platforms [and] has become the accepted measure of album success." Physical albums have mostly turned into collector's items as noted by a 2016 poll by ICM Research, which found that nearly half of the surveyed people did not listen to the record they bought.