NIELSEN IS VERY WITHHOLDING

Some biz folks are going crazy over the inconsistency of Nielsen’s metrics when it comes to measuring streams.

During the first few hours after a record drops—after midnight ET but still Thursday in other time zones—why does Nielsen count sales but not streams? It’s long been their policy to add downloads that happen during this three-hour window to a release’s first-week total, but streams aren't counted in that same tally.

This came to a head with Drake’s Scorpion, which came in with 746m streams on the Top 200, well shy of the 770m tabulated by HITS; the discrepancy can almost completely be attributed to Thursday-night streams. Don’t Nielsen and the Bible understand that bigger numbers are better for everyone? What possible rationale could they have for this inconsistent, silly policy?