Billboard is changing its Hot 100 chart hits metric to include music from online portals Yahoo! and AOL. It will measure both video and audio streams.
"Record companies absolutely know we are in a new era," says Geoff Mayfield, Billboard's director of charts. "For a lot of kids, the computer screen is what the record store used to be for me when I was a kid."
The two web giants offer ad-supported listening in viewing for visitors, which has become an increasingly big part of music lovers' way of consuming music.
They will also add another popular site Rhapsody, an offering from Real Network, at a later time, along with others.
For now the majority of measuring will still be radio with a 55 percent weighting, and 40 percent weighting will be directed toward music download sites like Apple (AAPL) iTunes. Streaming will entail 5 percent of weighting at the beginning of the initiative.
What this will probably do is make a difference in the chart races that are close to one another.
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