Billboard will resume counting YouTube activity in its music charts starting in 2027. The Google-owned platform cut off its data feed to the chart publisher in December 2025.
YouTube’s reason for cutting off its data feed was Billboard’s weighting model, which it said undervalues free, ad-supported streams. That model still favors paid-subscriber plays over free ones. Billboard says it will recalibrate the ratio, shrinking the gap between the two tiers.
For years, a free stream carried far less weight than a paid one, and it took 2,500 of them to equal a single album unit. That changes in January 2027, when 1,500 ad-supported streams will be enough, the same as one album sold or 1,000 plays from paying listeners.
Billboard includes streaming data in the Billboard 200 and Hot 100. The same data is used for its album genre charts and multi-metric song charts.
YouTube has agreed to share its data with Billboard again, citing the chart’s new equivalence rules. In an update to its earlier announcement that it was pulling out, the company said it is returning to the charts in 2027 and that Billboard’s new methodology “better reflects how fans engage with music today across both subscription and ad-supported services.”
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