Ali Mayhew ([email protected])
Thu, 07 Jan 1999 23:26:57 -0800
I am by no means an expert on soundscan, but I'll try to share with you
what I know. I have some experience with soundscan and from what I know
they are fairly accurate with there results. The way that they figure
album sales is based on simple sales. Each item scaned equals one album
sold for an artist. Seems like a basic rule, but it really isn't that
simple. Not all music stores report their sales figures to soundscan so
there are always stores that won't be accounted for. Soundscan had to
come up with a way to account for these stores. Soundscans way of
dealing with this is to try and balance these figures out. They do this
by giving certain stores more credit for each album sold. I know that
there is a store in LA called Aron's that gets 10 credits for each album
sold. So for each Pop album sold at that location it would show up as
ten according to Soundscan. Of course not all stores equal ten credits.
That is the rarity. Most like virgin, tower, etc. one sold is one
counted. Soundscan is so sophisticated that it can even tell you how
many albums are sold at a specific location. Of course that is only for
the larger outlets though.
Hope that helps...
Ali
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Thu Jan 07 1999 - 23:34:50 PST