As technology changes the way people listen to music, music charts must keep up in order to be relevant. Oricon has long faced criticism due its lagging in keeping up with technological changes. In an attempt to keep up, Oricon created a digital album chart in November 2016, followed by a digital single chart in December 2017.
When the creation of the digital single chart was announced, Oricon said that it was looking into creating a chart that combined physical and digital sales. That chart will make its debut on December 19.
This new chart will in fact be two new charts, one for singles and one for albums. These new charts will combine physical sales, digital sales, and streaming. Oricon’s streaming chart will debut the same day as the two other new charts.
The combined single chart will count CD singles, single song downloads, download single bundles (as in A-sides and other coupling tracks), and streams. The combined album chart will count CD albums, download album bundles (as in full albums), and streams. Both of these charts will use a point system due to the different formats being combined.
The streaming chart will count the number of streams by paid users of Apple Music, AWA, KKBOX, LINE MUSIC, and Recochoku.
The new charts’ period will run Monday to Sunday every week. They will debut December 19, but will be dated as December 24, as Oricon does now. The first week of the new charts will count sales and streams for the week of December 10 – 16. All three charts will feature the top 100 releases of the week.
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