by Zack Zarrillo

All Time Low sold a shitton of albums by today’s standards. The 75,000 copies of Future Hearts that the band and Hopeless Records moved secured the spot for the number one selling album over the past week. The soundtrack for Furious 7 sold 30,000 less copies and secured the second spot. Future Hearts and Furious 7 swapped places on the Billboard 200, however, with All Time Low accounting for 80,000 sales and Vin Diesel’s biceps accounting for 111,000 sales. Huh? In December, Billboard facelifted it’s charting system.

From Billboard:

The updated Billboard 200 will utilize accepted industry benchmarks for digital and streaming data, equating 10 digital track sales from an album to one equivalent album sale, and 1,500 song streams from an album to one equivalent album sale. All of the major on-demand audio subscription services are considered, including Spotify, Beats Music, Google Play and Xbox Music.

That shift in calculation is what, as my Bad Timing Records co-owner Thomas Nassiff says, robbed All Time Low of a #1 album on Billboard:

The reason this is a “robbery” is not because Streaming And Single Sales Are Bad And It Shouldn’t Be Counted. That’s not the point. It’s just a specific case study where some extreme and unacceptable bullshit has occurred. Wiz Khalifa has a very successful single on this soundtrack, and it’s performing phenomenally well on iTunes, and Spotify, and other places where people consume digital music. This week, single sales accounted for 52,262 “equivalent album sales” for the Furious 7 soundtrack (meanwhile, All Time Low benefitted only 3,123 equivalent album sales by the same metric); the soundtrack’s streaming activity counted for 7,763 additional sales (1,753 for All Time Low).

But the people buying or streaming this Wiz single, which is No. 1 on the Hot 100 this week, finally displacing Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” after 14 straight weeks atop that chart, aren’t here for the Furious 7 OST; they’re here for that song. “See You Again,” as awesome of a tribute as it is to the late Paul Walker and as much as it obviously deserves its position at the top of the Hot 100, shouldn’t be the driving force behind a soundtrack, of all things, dislodging an album that outperformed it in traditional sales significantly at the top of the Billboard 200. It discredits the efforts put forth by the band’s incredibly loyal fanbase and the years of hard work put forth by Hopeless Records.

I think Thomas has overstated a lot of this to the point of doing a disservice to All Time Low and Hopeless Records. I was not there when Billboard decided 10 digital track sales from an album and 1,500 song streams from an album are each equivalent to one album sale, but it’s hard to disagree with those numbers. Albums in the modern day tend to have ten songs, so Billboard deciding that ten single sales from an album equal out to one album sold sounds fair. While I franky don’t know if 1,500 streams are equivalent to one single sale, it doesn’t sound outrageous. Ultimately, I believe it was smart and right of Billboard to modernize themselves, and I don’t see them changing or adjusting their model any time soon as I’m sure a world of thought went into the recent shift. If this system was in place for six more months, two more years, and so on, we would all be adjusted to it now. We wouldn’t be reading an article about how the band was robbed by the modern day Billboard charts. No one can take away from All Time Low that they sold the most albums in the country this week or that their best selling album came after a major label stumble and at a time where people believe it’s impossible to sell music. This is the largest day of the band’s career - I don’t believe we should be shaking our fists at Billboard for “taking away” something from them.

In the 90′s and early 2000′s, albums sold for $10 to $20 by major label artists featured 1 to 3 “smash hits” and a whole lot of fluff in between. Those albums were being sold because of the singles, and greatly displaced charting numbers because fans could not get the singles without the entire album. In 2015, fans can get their favorite songs off of an album by buying the full album, buying the single, or via streaming. It’s more fan-friendly model. Wiz Khalifa has a “smash hit” on this Furious 7 soundtrack that is greatly boosting the success of it. It doesn’t sound that different from the landscape 15 years ago to me. Do I agree that albums should be filled with fluff due to one single? No. But do I think arguing that the new model is robbery while saying the old model would have “protected” All Time Low? No. I don’t think that’s a fair claim.

Here’s a little more from Thomas’ article:

When I reached out to Hopeless Records for a comment on this story, this was the official response I received that I was allowed to publish: “We are excited for All Time Low and the independent community and grateful to the All Time Low fans. We know without a doubt this is the No. 1 album in America.”

You could choose to read that with spite, but I didn’t. All Time Low do have the best selling album in America. Billboard no longer believes it is their job to showcase, on the charts, the best selling album when more revolves around popularity than just full sales in 2015. The state of music in 2015 includes singles and streams. If you can’t accept that, then sure, All Time Low got robbed. If you can accept that the music industry has advanced in 2015, then the band did a kickass job and had fair competition and success.

Don’t panic.