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This week's "number one" song by Rhianna has "moved" 54,000 copies, and those numbers are almost certainly as inflated as possible. From Forbes: "Anti rules t

by nihonde 10y ago

This week's "number one" song by Rhianna has "moved" 54,000 copies, and those numbers are almost certainly as inflated as possible. From Forbes: "Anti rules the Billboard 200 with just 54,000 equivalent units moved. If that figure was comprised only of actual sales, it would make it one of the lowest-selling number one albums of all time, but it’s actually a combination of both pure purchases and streams. When looking solely at sales, Anti sold a paltry 17,000 copies. Yes, that’s right—the number one album in the largest music market in the world sold just 17,000 units."

6stringmerc 10y ago
Funny story with Rihanna and "moving" copies: Jay-Z struck a deal with Samsung to "buy" the 1 million download credits and give them away to people on the internet so her album would go Platinum by RIAA standards in its first week (provided they all got downloaded, which they did). Talk about a joke.
- nihonde 10y ago
  Yeah, if you read Hit Men by Fredric Dannen, you can learn about how they used to skew the numbers for record sales by counting every copy that shipped, regardless of whether it was sold or returned. And today, we are told that 1,500 streaming plays equals an album sale, which is presumably because they tell us that royalties are something like $0.0017 per play and the artist's cut should be around $2.25 per album sale? Who knows.
  - 6stringmerc 10y ago
    Not so much the "Who knows" bit at the end because I think your numbers are exactly right on the Billboard/RIAA counting process. It was recently revised. Having worked in a big box US media retailer I can still recall putting 27 DVDs on the shelf of the Johnny Knoxville flop "The Ringer" and taking the same 27 DVDs off the rack later to ship...somewhere else. A lot of 'eat these and we will cut you a better deal on the ones you REALLY want' type deals were made, I'm pretty sure - no hard evidence, but fits the industry profile.

by nihonde 10y ago

6stringmerc 10y ago

Funny story with Rihanna and "moving" copies: Jay-Z struck a deal with Samsung to "buy" the 1 million download credits and give them away to people on the internet so her album would go Platinum by RIAA standards in its first week (provided they all got downloaded, which they did). Talk about a joke.

nihonde 10y ago
Yeah, if you read Hit Men by Fredric Dannen, you can learn about how they used to skew the numbers for record sales by counting every copy that shipped, regardless of whether it was sold or returned. And today, we are told that 1,500 streaming plays equals an album sale, which is presumably because they tell us that royalties are something like $0.0017 per play and the artist's cut should be around $2.25 per album sale? Who knows.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Not so much the "Who knows" bit at the end because I think your numbers are exactly right on the Billboard/RIAA counting process. It was recently revised. Having worked in a big box US media retailer I can still recall putting 27 DVDs on the shelf of the Johnny Knoxville flop "The Ringer" and taking the same 27 DVDs off the rack later to ship...somewhere else. A lot of 'eat these and we will cut you a better deal on the ones you REALLY want' type deals were made, I'm pretty sure - no hard evidence, but fits the industry profile.