Album-equivalent unit

The album-equivalent unit, or album equivalent, often shortened to just unit, is a sales metric in the music industry that defines the number of songs streamed and songs downloaded equal to one album sale. The album-equivalent unit was introduced in the mid-2010s as an answer to the drop of album sales in the 21st century. Album sales more than halved from 1999 to 2009, declining from a $14.6 to $6.3 billion industry, partly due to cheap digitally downloaded singles. For instance, the only albums that went platinum in the United States in 2014 were the Frozen soundtrack and Taylor Swift's 1989, whereas several albums had gone platinum in 2013. The use of album-equivalent units transformed the music charts from a ranking of best-selling albums into a ranking of most popular albums. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have used album-equivalent unit to measure their Global Recording Artist of the Year since 2013.