Making Your Record Count

In the recording industry, the term "success" is relative. If you don't have a track record, you're all potential. And if you've had an album out before, you're expected to surpass that level of achievement. But how does anyone really know how you're doing? Now its down to a science. Two barometers of your position in the marketplace are SoundScan and BDS.

SoundScan® is a system that counts album sales, based upon computerized tracking systems at record stores and other music retailers. Each time the CD or tape's bar code is scanned and a purchase is made at a  SoundScan-affiliated retailer (more than 80% of stores are said to report to  SoundScan), the information is noted. Reports with the results of compiled sales activity data are distributed to the industry every Wednesday morning.

This point of sale tracking is extremely detailed, including not only geographic regions (dividing the US into eight areas and/or by major metropolitan area), it also will tell you whether the store is in a city, suburb or rural area; the store size and type (mall, strip, stand alone); what the store sells (music only, music and video sales, music and video sales and rentals, predominantly video); the area's video channel viewership (MTV, VH1 and/or CMT); as well as ethnicity and income information (high income, low income, Black Area, Hispanic Area, etc.). 

Far more accurate than the various tracking methods employed in the past, SoundScan provides sales data to all the major record companies, many music industry publications and over 2000 radio stations. Such immediate feedback with a high level of detail allows those within the industry to spot trends, predict future sales and to concisely plan their marketing efforts.

After you get your barcode number, Please download this document, print it out, fill in the blanks and then mail it to Soundscan so they can track you properly.

BDS, or Broadcast Data Systems, generates reports detailing radio airplay. If a song of yours is played in Peoria at in the middle of a Tuesday night, that "spin" will show up on the BDS report. Using special computer technology, BDS monitors thousands of radio stations in the US and Canada 24 hours a day, and compares what it hears to over 110,000 electronic song pattern "fingerprints" in its database. When a song is recognized, the computer notes the date, time and radio station, and every day at midnight, the remote monitors transmit the day's broadcast data to BDS headquarters. Reports are generated and can be transmitted to record labels and management companies as early as the next morning. If you put out your own CD and are wondering if your stuff is showing up on BDS reports, you can be sure that it is not. The BDS library only includes the songs that have been entered into it, and not just every song played on the air, and the database is purged often to make room for new songs it needs to "listen" for. The consumer often sees the end result of BDS reports in the media, and this, in turn, also affects sales. Launched in Kansas City by Robert Uhlmann during the seventies, BDS is now owned by BPI Communications, which is also Billboard Magazine's parent company.

Learning to read these reports accurately can take some time, as the sheer volume of information can be pretty overwhelming. Once you get the hang of it, though, it can be an interesting lesson in sociology -- especially when you read the two reports side-by-side and look at the effect of radio play on sales. 

There are also yardsticks of your success available to the general public -- so not only will your business manager and your mother know how well you're doing, everyone else will, too.

Gold and Platinum Records
In the U.S., records are formally certified "gold" or "platinum" by the Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA). Taking the expression "gold record" (meaning a hit single or album) from the figurative to the literal, the RIAA instituted a formal certification process in 1958 by creating the gold award, an honor earned when a single or album ships 500,000 units to retailers (not necessarily the actual sales). Platinum awards, meaning one million units shipped, first appeared in 1976, and multi-platinum awards in 1984.

The format of the actual award has changed over the years, from prominently featuring a gold-colored 12" vinyl record to the current CD and/or cassette on the award. (In many cases, actual LPs and/or CDs are used: rejects and returns find a new life.) All awards also feature a gold- or platinum-colored RIAA hologram logo and an inscription plaque with the album title, artist, record company, and sales volume the award is commemorating as 
well as the name of the recipient. The awards are given to the band members and usually also to everyone else wh had a role in the album's success: the producer, the record company, management, attorneys, personal trainers, 
butlers and so forth.

Elsewhere in the world, the terms signify sales more or less in proportion to the size of the country. For example, you can go gold in in Spain for selling 50,000 units or in Germany for sales of 250,000. In Japan, if you sell 200,000 units, you've hit platinum, while you only need 75,000 to earn the same honor in Australia.

The Charts
There are countless charts out there -- some based upon sales, others on radio play, internet polls and/or thousands of other variations. But the charts that really matter to the American music industry are those published in Billboard Magazine -- and of those, all eyes are focused on the two biggies: The Billboard 200: "The top-selling albums complied from a national sample of retail store and rack sales reports collected, compiled and provided by SoundScan®." (see above); and The Billboard Hot 100 Singles: "Complied from a national sample of Top 40 radio airplay monitored by Broadcast Data Systems, Top 40 radio playlists, and retail and rack singles sales reports collected, compiled and provided by SoundScan®."

New charts come out weekly, and success thereupon is relative -- unlike the Gold or Platinum awards mentioned above. Here, whoever sells the most, wins. For example, Mariah Carey's album debuted on the September 21st Top 200 chart one year with sales of 235,468 units, although the week before, LeAnn Rimes was number one with sales of a mere 185,991 units. But both of those sales levels pale in comparison to the Wu-Tang clan's one week sales record of 612,069 the prior June.

At the far end of the Top 200 chart, sales of about 5,000 will earn you a place. Sounds like small potatoes, but it means you're doing pretty well. All records were broken recently on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart as Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" sold over 2.8 million copies. The previous title holder, Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," moved a comparatively meager 632,000 in December of 1992. Had Elton John's single release coincided with December's holiday season, that tally would undoubtedly have been even higher. While the peak period for music sales is from September to December, the majority of those sales are concentrated in the holiday period. The total weekly album sales around Christmastime this year will probably top twelve million. All told, Americans bought 1.14 billion pieces of musical plastic last year, which cost them about $12.5 billion. So now you know how record companies can afford to sign bands to six and seven figure record deals.

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