Marsden Global

I've never been much of a believer in what Billboard has to say, and I certainly don't trust their weekly music charts. Having said that I post this just as a matter of interest. I've recently seen some of the major album sales in Canada and they are startlingly low.

Billboard reported on weekly album sales today from Soundscan, noting benchmark low performance, and identifying long-term trends. They key bullet point is 3.97-million units sold in the latest reporting week — the first time album sales have dipped under 4-million.

The report itemizes benchmarks from last year, when average weekly sales crossed below 5-million in the third quarter. This year, the quarterly averages are 4.75-million (Q1) and 4.55-million (Q2). Tellingly, the 5-million floor that existed for album sales in the first half of 2013 has become a rarely-approached ceiling in 2014. Billboard makes a trendline prediction that in 2015, weekly sales will drift in the 3-4 million range.

Weekly Soundscan numbers do not correlate to streaming metrics or the potential displacement of ownership by access. But that corollary trend is documented in longer-term reports by the RIAA and IFPI. Just this week, one branch of the IFPI released a year-over-year comparison of streaming and purchasing in one market — Denmark — indicating a clear pattern of the former replacing the latter.

Here's some information about Soundscan....seems to me the biggest loser in the numbers reported are the independents and those not receiving radio play due to tight radio playlists.

IE - Slave To The Squarewave had 3 albums in the top 10 in heavy rotation on Rdio over this past weekend - but that won't show on Soundscan. Too bad!!!

About Soundscan...

Nielsen SoundScan is an information and sales tracking system created by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett. SoundScan is the most adopted[citation needed] method of tracking sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada. Data is collected weekly and made available every Wednesday to subscribers, which include record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV companies, and artist managers. SoundScan is the sales source for the Billboard music charts, making it the largest source of sales records in the music industry.

Sales data from cash registers is collected from 14,000 retail, mass merchant, and non-traditional (on-line stores, venues, digital music services, etc.) outlets in the United States, Canada, UK and Japan.
The requirements for reporting sales to Nielsen SoundScan are that the store has Internet access and a point of sale (POS) inventory system. Submission of sales data to Nielsen SoundScan must be in the form of a text file consisting of all the UPCs sold and the quantities per UPC on a weekly basis. Sales collected from Monday-Sunday or Sunday-Saturday are reported to SoundScan every Monday and made available to SoundScan subscribers every Wednesday.