Industries are fearful of legislation. But if you start in the marketplace and forge a solution, you get a lot less resistance - and often a more flexible approach.
10 years ago [in 2006], nearly 90 percent of those albums sold enough in that year to reach Gold status. 10 years later, about 30 percent were eligible. With the new rules, we figure about 40 percent of the top 200 best-sellers for the year will be eligible. We were very cautious in our approach to changing how we calculate what is eligible because the integrity of the process is our foremost consideration. It's difficult to get certified sales awards, and it's a big deal and we didn't want there to be a huge change in how many would be eligible.
There will be no breakout. When we changed for the single, we never specified what the breakout for sales to streams were.
We do not take into account the value of the stream. We see the number of streams as a measure of consumer demand, not the value. As it is, we think streams are under-monetized, and we are complaining loudly about that. If the value of a stream changes, we won't alter the count because we don't want to alter the history of the program because that would impact these milestone achievements.
