With only 18,000 downloads, "Harlem Shake" did not make the last Hot 100 chart. But last week it caught fire online, and across the tens of thousands of dance videos the song had 103 million views in the United States, according to YouTube, and sold 262,000 downloads, making it the third-most downloaded track of the week. Even without the YouTube data, “Harlem Shake” would have charted in the Top 15 this week, with the YouTube virality certainly driving downloads.
Bill Werde, the magazine’s editorial director, the rise of “Harlem Shake” led Billboard to move forward on the update they'd already been in discussions with YouTube about for nearly two years. Billboard’s charts use data collected by Nielsen SoundScan, which has also been modernizing its data. The service launched in 1991 to provide reliable, third-party sales data to record labels, retailers and others in the music business. They now gather data from all popular streams. “We want to measure how much consumption is going on, in whatever form a consumer chooses to consume something,” said David Bakula, a senior analyst at Nielsen.
