Who is feeding Fox News' Roger Friedman his information, and why can't he/she do a better job? Friedman all but declared the end of the recorded music industry in his column two days ago, starting off with, "The top 20 pop albums sold fewer than a total of 750,000 CDs last week." NOW 22, he wrote, sold only 220,000 (actual number was 397,000) and called the situation "a crisis that no one acknowledges in the record business."

The next day he corrected himself, sort of, and said the album chart really started at #2 because NOW 22 doesn't count as an "actual album." So taking out the nearly 400,000 NOW 22 disqualified sales, fe feels his numbers really weren't that far off. What?

For the record, the Top 10 titles sold 938,000, the best in the last four weeks. Sales were up 3% over the previous week and are down 5% over last year. In the Track Equivalent Albums method Soundscan uses as a broad measure (ten single downloads count as one album) sales are up 0.8% in the first half of 2006.

Continue reading "Friedman Gets Fed The Wrong Numbers" »

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