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NYT: Taylor Swift, No. 1 Again, Is Last to Benefit From an Obscure Chart
Rule https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/arts/music/taylor-swift-folklore-billboard.html

By Ben Sisario

Taylor Swift, who holds the No. 1 album for a second time with
"Folklore," may be one of the last stars to benefit from Billboard's
so-called bundling rule, which lets artists sell albums with
merchandise or concert tickets. Long criticized for distorting the
charts, that guideline is set to be curtailed in October.

But Swift is also the last to gain an advantage from a lesser-known
chart rule, one that is a bit of a brain-twister: the bundling of a
physical album with a digital one.

Billboard has long tried to reconcile the delays that can happen
when a fan orders a physical copy of an album, like a vinyl LP, from
an artist's website. With release cycles moving faster than ever
these days, records and CDs are sometimes not ready to ship when a
new title starts streaming; in the case of vinyl, backlogs of weeks
or even months are common. So artists often combine the sale of a
physical album and a digital version, and send fans the digital one
while they wait.

Until recently, Billboard and Nielsen Music, which supplies the
magazine's data, have counted the first version sent to fans. For an
album like "Folklore," with CDs and LPs not available right away,
that meant the digital copy.

But this rule, which was meant to register fan purchases during an
album's all-important opening week--and also prevent double
counting--has a host of complications, including undercounting
physical product. Last year, Nielsen counted just 73.5 million
physical album sales in the United States. How much higher is the
real number, if many delayed vinyl and CDs were categorized as
digital instead?

Effective last Friday, Billboard changed how it accounts for
physical albums that are bundled with digital versions. Those sales
will now be counted as physical copies--but only once the album is
shipped to a fan. That may be a blow to the opening-week numbers for
an artist like Swift, as collectible items make their way to fans
later on. And it will further advantage streaming activity.

In the second week out for "Folklore," Swift still offered her fans
lots of merch deals. But of the 135,000 sales that Billboard and
Nielsen recorded for the album--down 84 percent from its opening
--the majority were attributed to streaming. Songs from the album
were streamed 134 million times, while 30,000 copies of it were sold
as a complete package.

Also this week, two posthumous albums--Pop Smoke's "Shoot for the
Stars Aim for the Moon" and Juice WRLD's "Legends Never Die"--are
No. 2 and 3. The "Hamilton" Broadway cast album is No. 4, and Lil
Baby's "My Turn" is No. 5.

Beyoncé's album "The Lion King: The Gift," a companion to Disney's
2019 film, re-entered the chart at No. 10, after she put out a
deluxe version of the LP with the release of "Black Is King," her
new visual album on Disney+.

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