Official Charts will take the 12 most streamed tracks from the standard version of the album, the top two songs will be down-weighted in line with the average of the rest. The total of these streams will be divided by 1000 and added to the physical and digital sales of the album (the 1,000 ratio is used to reflect the broad difference in value between a track stream and the price paid for an album).
The reason for the down-weighting is to ensure that if an album features up to two runaway hit singles, streams of these tracks do not skew the performance of their parent album in the Official Albums Chart. Extreme examples of this include huge hits such as Blurred Lines on the Robin Thicke album of the same name, Get Lucky on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, All Of Me on John Legend’s album Love In The Future, or Uptown Funk on Mark Ronson’s Uptown Special - but this is also a broader issue affecting many more albums.
The thing I don't like about streaming being included on both single and album charts is that artists are doubly rewarded. Streaming is the future, but include it on one chart or the other, not both.
Great news, and the formula used is fantastic and should stop massive one hit wonders from scoring a successful album purely off the back of that one song, unlike the US.
Y'all sound like the people who hated digital downloads being added to the charts, by the way.
