Billboard changes album charting policy; A obvious policy or a reflection of the music industry?

http://www.billboard.com/#/column/chartbeat/billboard-200-undergoes-makeover-1004043310.story

The above article came out a few weeks back discussing how the Billboard Top 200 album chart will undergo a change. In the past the chart would only allow albums to chart on the Top 200 if the album was released within the past 18 months, does not have a charting single, and has fallen below the Top 100, then it can not chart on the Billboard 200. The albums that sell after reaching that criteria chart on a the Top Catalog Albums. Now, on paper it sounds like a obvious decision, that in many ways makes simple sense. No matter when an album was released, it should chart it sales on the same chart. And, how many albums released from 3 years or 13 years ago are still selling in a the same numbers as when they were released (very few), so it would make no difference.

But, to me there is probably a little more going on. There music industry is not selling numbers in the manner it has in the past. For example the best selling album of 2008, Lil Wayne's Tha Carter III, selling 2.88 million. Pretty impressive, but go back a couple years to 2005, the best selling album, Mariah Carey's "The Emancipation of Mimi" selling over 5 million copies, nearly twice of Lil Wayne. But go all the way back to 2000, when N'sync was the best selling album sold 9.9 million in for the year. And a year earlier, the Backstreet Boys "Millennium" sold 11 million album in a year!

Of course, in 2000 file sharing was not as prevent, but Itunes also did not exist and digital sales count to the Billboard count. Long story short, albums are not selling at the rate they once did. Artists are becoming single based, they sell singles that chart well and sell well, but the albums they come off of do not. Lady GaGa has had 5 Top ten singles off her debut album and not even gone multi-platinum.

The second reason, which is may have been the more impactful for the timing of the decision than the decision itself. For three weeks this summer, the top Catalog album outsold the top top 200 album. The album was Michael Jackson's "Number Ones" released in 2003 to a lukewarm reception. This greatest hits sold so well as a result of Jackson's death, and since many retailers had this album in higher stock than his other album, it was what people picked up first. This event is minor to many, but the impact is that a greatest hits album released 6 years ago (sometimes viewed as a replacement to the "HIStory" greatest hits double disc that came out in 1995) could outsell an artist in the present making new music.

Billboard can create positive reasons to why they are combining charts, but it is much more likely that the chart is being created out of necessity, albums are not selling near as well as they were and in order to make it appear that albums are selling in better numbers*, they need to combine the charts.

*Billboard lists how many albums are sold weekly in their website, but the numbers are always mentioned in the end of the article, and only compared to the same week last year, and total yearly sales are only compared to the totals of the previous year.