Billboard has changed the rules on artists’ sales and chart positions, allowing artists to sell specific merchandise bundles and have them count on album charts. This change will be set in motion this summer.

According to New Musical Express, “bundling” is the act of grouping together merchandise with a free download of an album into a single purchase, with the intent of boosting album sales. Back in 2020, Billboard originally had excluded bundles from the sales count when determining top chart scores. These bundles, referred to as “fan packs” by Billboard, will allow fans to boost their favorite artists’ numbers on the charts, just with “new rules” at play. These new rules have been introduced in an effort to “prevent issues that led to the elimination” of bundles in the past.

The Billboard 200 will count some package offerings of music and collectibles as fans seek to support their favorite acts through merch purchases https://t.co/xV3ku6cJwl

— billboard (@billboard) May 4, 2023

Billboard states that the new rules will require that “The packs will be restricted to just two options per album release, a sweatshirt with an LP and a t-shirt with a CD, for example, with the requirement that each individual item must also be sold separately in the same web store.” They further elaborated that “Fan packs will include only merch, not tickets, meet-and-greet opportunities, virtual items or non-tangible benefits and they must also contain a physical copy of an album: Combinations of digital downloads and merch will not count towards the charts. In addition, fan pack offerings must be approved in advance of their on-sale date by Luminate and Billboard.”

In the past, bundles were not counted due to artists including albums with nearly all of their merch, resulting in heavily inflated sales counts.