How do you measure a “play”?
In an ideal world, it is one unique person consciously playing one unique song with intent and to its full extent, from nearly the beginning to nearly the end.
We can quibble about the parameters — what makes a play a play is a battlefield more for lawyers and contract negotiations than artists — but we know for sure what a play is not. It’s not a bot, or an Android screwed to a rack at a phone farm in Shenzhen, endlessly refreshing screens and playing songs over and over to bump up play counts. The economics of streaming are complex, intentionally opaque and the people who profit from it every step of the way really don’t want you to dig too deep into how the whole thing works, from the “pro-rata” royalty model that ensures big stars get a cut of every dollar on the platform to the anatomical level of defining a “play.”
But one thing is very clear: plays on YouTube don’t count for very much. The guardians of the industry have actually measured how little they matter: when it comes to measuring popularity — in other words, song charts, top 10s, the Billboard Top 100 — a stream on YouTube has been worth only 1/3rd of a stream of the same song on Spotify.
Google and Spotify are at war over the value of each individual music stream. Artists & labels are caught in the crossfire.
YouTube isn’t happy about this. They claim their video platform, like a matryoshka doll, contains within it the largest music platform in the world, serving up tracks and paying for them with revenue generated from ads. They also maintain a premium service, YouTube Music. In this they’re no different than Spotify, which also splits their users between paid premium tiers and a free ad-supported tier.
After YouTube agitated for a more favorable valuation of a YouTube play, Billboard announced that they would compromise. A YouTube play would no longer be worth 1/3rd of a Spotify play. It would still be unequal, but a little less — from 1/3rd to 2/5ths of a Spotify play.
For YouTube’s extremely plugged-in chief of music, ex-Def Jam & Warner Music Group exec Lyor Cohen, this wasn’t enough. In a statement that likely ruined a few office holiday parties, Cohen announced that YouTube is now boycotting Billboard, and would no longer send any data to the company for its charts after January 16, 2026.
“We’re simply asking that every stream is counted fairly and equally, whether it is subscription-based or ad-supported,” Cohen wrote, “because every fan matters and every play should count.”
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Album Consumption Units & Other Fictions
While each side argues over the value of a play, it’s worth remembering that this little math formula and ratio was fabricated out of thin air to measure sales that don’t actually happen.
More than a decade ago, as streaming began to surge among music fans, Billboard was confronted with the fact that their beloved charts — the main reason they exist — no longer reflected reality. The industry could no longer measure the popularity of an album by how many units it sold, because fewer and fewer people “bought” albums. Even digital downloads were in sharp decline. Billboard now had to figure out how to value listens.
Youtube is essentially arguing for an arbitrary change to an arbitrary formula designed to represent album sales that no longer exist.
Without sales data to back its rankings, Billboard devised a bizarre and seemingly random formula using streaming data in place of the actual sales that once took place. By current measurements, 3,750 ad-supported streams from a single ten track album make up an “album consumption unit” — the unbelievably wonky term meant to approximate about one “sale.” For premium users who pay a monthly subscription, that number is only 1,250 streams. That’s how a YouTube play came to be worth 1/3rd of a Spotify play.
YouTube is essentially arguing for an arbitrary change to an arbitrary formula designed to represent album sales that no longer exist. This is the state of the music industry in 2026.
5 Mag Issue 223
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When The Elephants Fight
While both YouTube and Billboard couch their argument as a high-minded and righteous defense of fans and artists, fans and artists have almost nothing to do with this. There’s a saying, originally African in origin: “When the elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.” We’re just the grass (and so, for that matter, is Billboard).
The fight is really about traffic and how that traffic is monetized. The media often calls companies like Google and Spotify “tech giants,” but not all giants wear the same size trousers. YouTube is so big that it towers over even Spotify. If one were to cut YouTube out from its parent Google/Alphabet, it would create a top 200 US corporation by revenue. Its 2.7 billion monthly users represent an audience that is four times the size of Spotify’s and larger than Spotify and Apple Music’s audiences put together. (These users are on YouTube for much more than music, of course, though Spotify’s spent hand-over-fist on acquiring non-music IP to stream as well.)
YouTube’s business model requires billions of free users. Spotify’s free users are a little more than a pool of unconverted marks who haven’t yet passed through the final gate of the sales funnel for conversion into paid users.
Despite YouTube’s access to seemingly the entire planet, you will notice that artists (or rather artist management) will almost always promote new music by linking to Spotify and Apple Music sites over YouTube’s ad supported platform. This is partly short-term self interest — those platforms pay a little better, though not by much and certainly not the most (ironically, the subscription YouTube Music actually seems to pay more per stream). But there’s another reason, which is the reason at the heart of why a YouTube play is worth 1/3rd of a Spotify play.
The industry will claim that premium subscription users should count for more because they are verified. After all, you can sign up for a VPN and very quickly boost your own playcount on a free service, if only by a tiny amount. So favoring Spotify and Apple Music and other subscription services, they claim, is to combat fraud, because an ad-supported play is inherently easier to manipulate than one attached to a paid subscription. (Small groups of users have been manipulating with the sales charts on mp3-oriented platforms for years, and still do so today.)
There’s another reason though: the business model that was created by the major record labels in tandem with streaming platforms encourages paid subscriptions. Long term, they’ll all make more money that way. A portion of your monthly Spotify subscription payment trickles down to pop artists even if you’ve never listened to them, thanks to streaming’s “pro-rata” payment model.
Spotify and Apple Music are subscription services that also sell ads to monetize freeloaders. And that’s how they see them. Spotify’s premium users make up 39% of their total user base, but are responsible for 94% of the platform’s gross profit: $5.9 billion out of $6.2 billion. Revenue from ads served to the 61% of free users amount to a rounding error — just 6% of gross profit.
YouTube’s model is grandfathered from its parent company, Alphabet/Google, and is built on selling ads to free users. YouTube Music is their rounding error. For YouTube, locking in the eyeballs of every human being with a phone is the goal.
YouTube’s business model requires billions of free users. Spotify’s free users are a little more than a pool of unconverted marks who haven’t yet passed through the final gate of the sales funnel for conversion into paid users.
If you are a user of an ad supported platform, the industry thanks you for your patronage but doesn’t have a whole lot of use for you. That’s why they don’t send you to YouTube. Your contribution to creating “album consumption units” on YouTube matters less than it does elsewhere because you’re less likely to be converted into a paid user there.
You Have No Plays
The YouTube vs. Billboard fight is actually a Google vs. Spotify fight. Despite not really being about artists or fans, it will directly effect at least some of them. If their boycott lasts, a YouTube play will be devalued even further, from being worth 1/3rd of a Spotify play to zero.
Billboard chart position is often a factor in music contract negotiations and marketing spends, so these measurements departing even further from objective reality is probably not great for them.
A slap fight it may be, but this is after all a corporate slap fight, and these battles are rarely existential. They reach a constructive truce over drinks and ambiguous partnerships (or since these are tech companies, an exchange of biometrics via swinging and microdosing on peyote.)
This one probably will end in a truce too. Billboard has already shown that their formula for measuring imaginary album sales is kinda bullshit and that they can amend it at will. So they will amend it a little more, and Lyor Cohen and his bosses and everyone else that truly matters in this will be happy again.
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