The owner of music-industry trade magazine Billboard is acquiring Nielsen Music, the companies said, uniting the leading music-consumption tracking entity with the purveyor of the charts it powers under one roof.

The transaction comes as data is taking on an increasingly outsize role in the music industry.

Nielsen Music is the music industry data, analytics and software business of Nielsen Holdings. While long the trusted bearer of data across the record business in the U.S., it is facing competition from Spotify and Apple Music. Both of those streaming companies offer record labels data, analytics and charts, and do so on a worldwide basis — something that is rising in importance to labels as the industry becomes more global, thanks to streaming. Nielsen’s data is for the domestic market only.

Valence Media, Billboard’s parent company, expects Nielsen Music to continue to collect data from retailers and digital service providers and serve up various reports to clients, mostly music companies.

Until a decade ago Nielsen Music and Billboard were both owned by Dutch media company VNU. Nielsen Music’s consumption insights, which include physical sales, digital downloads, streaming and radio airplay, have fed the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, Billboard 200 albums chart and several other genre and airplay charts since 1991, when what is now Nielsen Music was known as SoundScan. Before that, Billboard ranked album sales based on less-reliable reports from retailers. SoundScan introduced a process of counting album sales based on bar-code scans during checkout.

It later began counting downloads from Apple’s iTunes Store and others, and more recently, it added streams from digital service providers to the count.

“Having these two entities under the same roof isn’t just nice to have but critical,” said Deanna Brown, president of the division of Valence that includes Billboard.

Drake accepting an award at the 2019 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May. PHOTO: MARIO ANZUONI/REUTERS