Heaneyland!

Wait...are you telling me the RIAA might not be being completely straight with me? Go on with you.

Turns out the RIAA's claims of dropping sales only hold up if you measure "sales" in an ass-backward fashion:

There is only one logical integration of all these statistics with the recent Soundscan data: even though actual point-of-purchase sales are up by about 9% in the US - and the industry sold over 13,000,000 more units in 2004 (1st quarter) than in 2003 (1st quarter) - the Industry is still claiming a loss of 7% because RIAA members shipped 7% fewer records than in 2003.

Forget the confusing percentages, here's an oversimplified example: I shipped 1000 units last year and sold 700 of them. This year I sold 770 units but shipped only 930 units. I shipped 10% less units this year. And this is what the RIAA wants the public to accept as "a loss."

So the RIAA is counting units shipped to stores and acting like what they're counting is actual sales. Meh? Seems to me that not only are they making more money from sales, they're losing less of their profits than they normally would because they're printing less CDs that don't sell!

(Via New Media Musings)

Posted by Francis at 05:56 PM