Lately various countries added track sales and streaming to their national album chart. And from this week on, the biggest music market of the world, the USA, makes the same. The official Billboard Top 200 Album Chart combined now album sales (conversion factor 1:1), digital track sales (10:1) and streaming (1500:1). And it seems that other countries follow this example in the next time. Let us look back in the past: with the breakthrough of the Compact Disc at the end of the Eighties and the earlier Nineties, the global album sales grew strongly with a peak in the second half of the Nineties. But now, for over 10 years the global album sales shrink dramatically. What happened?? The main reason for this decline was the new market of the Digital Tracks! Today many people don't buy a complete album as before, but they looking for the best tunes of an album and purchase only these songs. Since one, two years there's another 'problem'... Streaming! More and more people having a subscription of Spotify or other streaming-providers and buying no longer music in digital or physical formats. That's why the downward momentum of the global album sales accelerated this year and for the first time ever also the digital track sales are on the way down. Several times in the last months i thought about it, to give it up the Global Album Chart, because the worldwide sales fall further and further (certainly also in the coming years). I will summarize again: the Digital Track Sales and Streaming are the reasons for the decay of the global album sales, and that's why we follow the example of the US-Billboard Chart and other... from next year on we'll integrate Track Sales and Streaming tentatively for a hidden Global Album Chart. But the official hitlist on our Media Traffic website remains provisionally a pure sales chart (by popular request), till more countries and key markets switch over to a combined album chart.
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