Billboard Luminate will use direct physical sales data from indie retailers for their charts, including the Hot 100 Starting in 2024

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Billboard Luminate will use direct physical sales data from indie retailers for their charts, including the Hot 100.

Starting in 2024, Billboard will use direct physical sales data from indie retailers for their charts, including the Hot 100.

Currently, they estimate these sales using a modeled methodology.

The effort is Luminate’s latest in its continued mission to provide more accurate data to the music industry. At the Music Biz conference in May, the company unveiled a new and improved platform that includes enhanced search functionality, more comprehensive artist metadata, the addition of market-level data from specific countries and support for additional forms of consumption including short-form video and gaming.

Billboard‘s data partner Luminate is improving the way it collects and reflects album sales data from independent music retailers.

This week, Luminate revealed to all clients that in week 1 of 2024 (the reporting week that begins Dec. 29, 2023), data on physical sales (vinyl, CDs and cassettes) will reflect a direct representation of those reported from indie retailers in the United States and Canada. In the past, Luminate was unable to gather direct sales data from those retailers on a weekly basis, instead employing a modeled methodology.

The improved data will be incorporated into the Billboard charts beginning week 1 of 2024.

Along with communicating this information to retailers directly, Luminate is working with several associations supporting indie music retailers to ensure that instructions are clear and as simple as possible for accurate data reporting. The company is also working directly with major label groups to encourage indie retailers to submit data in order for in-store marketing efforts to be as effective and mutually beneficial as possible.

Sorting out the business side of things while in the midst of creation — who’s contributing to the song, who wrote what or how much, what percentage splits per writer are — can not only get very awkward very quickly, it can also ruin the creative process entirely.

Awkward or not, the nitty-gritty details of writing and recording songs, and the metadata behind that work, are all a big part of one of the music industry’s biggest headaches: namely, the insufficient songwriting and publishing data attached to the music that’s delivered to distributors. This massive collection of blind spots make it difficult or downright impossible to locate those who deserve to be paid royalties for their work, leading to a slew of class action lawsuits against Spotify, Tidal, Rhapsody and other streaming services, and resulted in the NMPA brokering a $30 million settlement between Spotify and its music publishing constituents over unpaid royalties resulting in that lack of data.