The fact that a stream is registered after a thirty second listen and then a certain amount of those generate a SALE is a joke. I never really paid much attention to these details till I think it was the last Foo Fighters record came out and it was number one in sales of everything, vinyl, cds etc... but not on the chart? The problem was they had low streaming numbers, or another act I forget who, had nothing BUT streaming numbers. Now I get it, streaming is mostly the way music is consumed, but 30 seconds strung together a certain amount of times shouldn't mean you sold something. Do a separate chart strictly for streaming numbers, since everyone TOUTS their big streaming numbers, lets see a chart strictly for it. This came out again for the new Metallica record which broke their streak of number one debuts, mainly because 95% of their sales were sales of product, and funny thing was this one writer (probably some pissed off napster dude) could only talk about how their streak was broken, oh man still those little pissed off "we want music for free" nerds.

I agree. It's ridiculous to equate streams to sales. What's more, the streams are often via passive listening on a playlist rather than a deliberate decision like a sale.

Even so, I don't think splitting to a separate streaming and sales chart will make much difference expect making us feel better. The industry kudos will go to the people in the streaming chart because they will be new artists.