The record industry and some artists may despise free streaming music for sheer monetary reasons, but Billboard – the grand daddy of all music magazines in the world, not at all seems opposed to the idea of making music available for free. The company now plans to introduce a major revamp in Billboard 200 – one of the most important charts in the music industry, by accounting for online streams and digital sales.

The company has been publishing the Billboard 200, a chart featuring the top-200 albums (by sales) week by week since 1956. Till now, it primarily factored in the total number of purchases of the physical/hard copies of an album. However, after this new update is introduced next month (Dec, 2014), Billboard 200 will also account for how fans have been listening to and buying digital music.

“Beginning with the top 10 revealed on Wednesday, Dec. 3, on Billboard.com (the full chart will post online the following day and in the Billboard issue dated Dec. 13), the chart, which currently tracks the top 200 albums of the week by sales alone, will be the first to include on-demand streaming and digital track sales (as measured by Nielsen Entertainment) by way of a new algorithm,” announced the company while shedding more light into the proposed new methodology.

“It is the most substantial methodology update since May 1991, when Billboard first used Nielsen’s point-of-sale data — SoundScan — to measure album sales.”

Under the revamped methodology, streaming 1,500 songs or selling 10 songs will be deemed equivalent to selling a single album. While these figures may seem arbitrary to many, Billboard claims that these are “accepted industry benchmarks”.

According to the company, odds are high that these updates will bring some drastic changes to its weekly top-200 charts. Musicians like Arian Grande, or bands like Maroon 5 are likely to rank much higher than ever before as they have a larger fan followings that seem to prefer digital downloads and online streaming. Meanwhile, many other artists whose fan bases prefer to purchase hard copies of their favourite albums, are bound to be disappointed in the long run.

“With current On-Demand audio play counts exceeding 100 billion so far this year, this method of consumption has redefined the way success is measured in the music industry,” David Bakula, SVP Industry Insights, Nielsen Entertainment, stated while speaking his mind on Billboards new ranking methodologies.

The still unusual-sounding idea of YouTube being the one of the places to go to for Spotify-style music subscription streaming is close to reality now, with the Google-owned company announcing their intentions of the paid-for spin-off brand this week.

It was revealed that the planned music subscription service by YouTube is set to be formally revealed next week, under the name of ‘YouTube Music Key’, which will be offered in the form of a free ad-supported and and a paid-for ad-free option (including additional features for options such as ‘download to device’), the latter being at rates of around $9.99/month but changing to £ or € depending on their currently-available locale.

That location, initially, will be limited to invite-only YouTube users in the USA, the UK, Ireland, Finland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, who will receive the option of a future 20% discount on their subscription rates for signing up to the beta trial launching soon. It is also noted that people with memberships of Google Play Music All Access will be able to cross-use the respective services, with a YouTube Music Key account allowing them to go the other way as well.

Following a recent arrangement with indie music record label agency Merlin (who manage over 20,000 labels) earlier this week, to go with existing music streaming deals with media giants Sony, Warner, and Universal, those users will have a range of music to choose from should they join, even if there is free (if ‘ad-supported’) access to most of the same songs should the user just knock the web address back to its more basic form.

YouTube are positive about the potential of their spin-off, though, and summarised their launch, stating: “Starting today, you’ll see a new home just for music on your YouTube app for Android, iOS and on YouTube.com that shows your favourite music videos, recommended music playlists based on what you’re into and playlists of trending music across YouTube.”

YouTube spokesperson Matt McLernon added: “Overall, we rely on the information that we get from our partners, or from the video uploader. So there are very specific cases like members of the music community, say a label or a publisher, where it’s very clear that it’s music, but the thing that makes YouTube so unique in the music space is, not only is there the traditional music side that everyone knows and loves, but with 300 hours of music and video coming to YouTube every minute, and much of that being music, there’s this whole spectrum of what people call music, or consider music, or share as music.”

We want it to be from both sides – we rely on the information the uploader puts in their YouTube video, but we also want to be an active part in that. This is the same concept of what we use to determine recommended or related videos. All the different signals that we’re aware of that would tell us people are playing these videos in the same way that they would play these types of music videos.”

An overview of what they plan to offer can be seen below:

As YouTube attempt to dispel the myth that music streaming and video streaming do not traditionally go together under the same brand:

For those that are of the belief that radio is dead… they are incredibly wrong if the BBC‘s faith in the format is anything to go by… you just have to add a little video to it, that’s all.

The British public broadcaster have made a new change to their well-known BBC iPlayer catch-up service, in making the BBC Radio 1 station the first and currently only radio station to be featured amongst their catch-up TV content on the channel list.

While the content will naturally not be as well-produced as their TV counterparts, the audio should at least be top-notch, with viewers able to tap into live and on-demand webcam-based and original special event content made by the radio station, as of yesterday (10 November), and considering that most radio coverage on British-wide stations is already streamed with such a video option, the broadcasters have not considered it too big a stretch to incorporate their biggest station into their on-demand TV platform.

BBC controller Ben Cooper said of the changes made: “What you’ll find on iPlayer will focus on Radio 1 live events, our family of brilliant presenters, and, of course, the lives of our young audience. Underpinning much of this is our dedication to discovering and curating the best new music. Our challenge is to continue to develop a proposition that both brings new young audiences to BBC iPlayer and also acts as another access point for audiences to discover the breadth of incredible content that Radio 1 delivers.”

Content available on launch includes coverage of the Teen Awards, a ‘brand new music chart show’, and recent ‘Live Lounge’ interview and music sessions with celebrities including Adele and modern method-lover Taylor Swift.

Following on from an existing official YouTube channel for BBC Radio 1 listeners to watch and of course the existing on-demand radio platform provided by the BBC, will turning radio into TV online be an unusual breakthrough in the on-demand industry?

While this past week should have been, and still is a big one for the Spotify music streaming service due to the launch of their ‘Family’ plan, there is still one drawback that was beyond their control – the whims of a celebrity.

It is singing star Taylor Swift who is the problem for Spotify at present, after last week she requested that all her music be taken down from the platform, up to and including new record-breaking album 1989.

Speaking to Yahoo, Swift explained her decision in an official statement, saying of the risky ‘experiment':

“If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened.

“But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free.

“I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it’s important to be a part of progress. But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word ‘music’ out of the music industry. Also, a lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with ‘Shake It Off’, and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, ‘I will try this; I’ll see how it feels’.

“It didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, ‘If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it’. I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things.”

Even if the analogy would be more likened to: ‘pay cheap museum season pass, and look around at the paintings as much as you want until it expires and a new pass is needed’.

Amidst rumours that the move could have occured as a result of the uncertainty at her record label Big Machine (currently rumoured to be looking for a buyer), Spotify stated in response to the news:

“We love Taylor Swift, and our more than 40 million users love her even more – nearly 16 million of them have played her songs in the last 30 days, and she’s on over 19 million playlists.

“We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone.

“We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.”

“PS – Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It’s a love story, baby, just say, Yes.”

To add to the pandering and pleading, Spotify also threw in a ‘coded playlist’ in the hopes that she reads the message, with a 15-song selection, in the order that their titles have been placed, reading: “Hey Taylor We Wanted Your Amazing Love Songs And They’re Not Here Right Now We Want You Back With Us And So Do, Do, Do Your Fans”

Not that Taylor Swift’s loss is one that she won’t notice, though, as Spotify were revealed last week as being the music industry’s primary source of royalties in the European market, with collection company Kolbalt reporting that the service has overtaken iTunes in Europe in terms of totals generated for the artists.

Kobalt’s CEO Willart Ahdritz stated: “Spotify overtaking iTunes in Europe is an important new milestone in streaming… The music industry’s infrastructure is failing [artists, songwriters, and publishers], unable to efficiently account for the enormous volumes of data from digital transactions.”

Looking to increase the number of those digital transactions is Spotify, who have their own reasons, though whether or not the celebrities their service features will be pleased remains to be seen, with the ‘Spotify Family’ ignoring the concerns of account-sharing that other streaming platforms frown upon, instead openly embracing the idea that up to four other users can join a Premium subscription at a discounted rate for their own profile, even if that ‘family’ is in fact just friends or a subscriber re-selling their bonus streaming rights to a third party.

A statement from Spotify on this move notes: “There are obviously many varieties of the ‘modern family’ and we don’t expect every family to share the same surname or even live under the same roof. With that said, this product is designed to benefit Spotify users and their families who want to enjoy music at an affordable price, yet still have their own personal music experience.”

While it seems as though Taylor Swift is content for now at acting as though the music industry is still in [insert album title here], will Spotify’s begging be able to make her change her mind on the ‘experiment’, or will a strong performance without her have the same effect?

In other words, on the theme of song titles, will Taylor Swift eventually:

Or remain saying:

The proposed music streaming service from YouTube looks to be a little closer to realisation, after reassurance from the video hosting site’s CEO that the idea has not been forgotten about.

Susan Wojcicki confirmed this week that a YouTube-branded subscription music streaming platform, designed to compete with the likes of Spotify, will arrive ‘in the near future’.

Previously planned for a release at some point this summer, the intended service has not yet arrived as YouTube may have liked just yet, but their executive insists that it is very much a reality for the Google-owned company.

Speaking to Re/Code, Wojcicki claimed that YouTube are currently developing ideas on the best ways “…to give people options” if they become members of the new service, with ideas such as subscription packages and pricing tiers believed to be on the table.

Additional plans hinted at in recent times are said to include access for users to more video-based content such as concert clips and music videos, though whether they tie that into their more famous brand or the website is in turn affected by the arrival of music streaming remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen what the service will be called, with informal reports suggesting the title ‘Music Key’, but whatever the name, will YouTube’s music streamer be able to play well against its rivals when it launches?