Calculating weekly album charts

[ToTo Man]

I'm about 20 years too late with this question so let's pretend it's the early noughties and CD, minidisc and vinyl sales still outnumber downloads and streams.

In the pre-internet era I imagine it was pretty easy for album chart compilers to receive data on weekly sales, as music was sold from traceable bricks 'n' mortar stores. I imagine the big chain retailers like HMV would have had automated systems that submitted timely sales numbers. The smaller independent stores perhaps not so timely, but I assume they would still have had an obligation to submit figures before a deadline?

As the big chain retailers opened online stores, sales numbers should have remained just as easy to obtain for the chart compilers. But then along comes Amazon Marketplace and eBay, where a plethora of previously unknown third-party sellers suddenly pop up offering the same product as the big established retailers. Are these small individual sellers obliged to report sales numbers and, if so, how often? This is of course assuming their stocks were legitimately obtained in the first place and didn't 'fall off the back of a lorry'...

EDIT - A different issue but I'm also curious what impact the transition from physical media to digital downloads and streams has had on record companies' infamous practice of 'bulk buying' their artists' releases to inflate their chart positions. Does this happen more or less than it used to? I suspect far less given the high number of streams that are required to affect chart position.

 

[Tony L]

The charts haven’t represented anything of value since maybe the 1970s. In the 80s everything fragmented as the major chains lost market-share and non-chart-return indies became the main outlets for much of the best selling music of the time (punk, new-wave, indie, new-wave of British Heavy Metal, techno, drum & bass etc), plus jazz and classical specialists were always jazz and classical specialists. Really the pop charts only ever represented what kids bought from WH Smiths, HMV, Virgin and other major shifters. They never represented what was actually happening, plus they were exceptionally easy to manipulate with corporate pluggers etc.

These days the pop charts will be predominantly streaming playlist-based. They are even more disconnected from the music people actually care about than they were in the past. The whole ‘charts’ thing was only ever corporate marketing/product-shilling. Since music has been democratised and freed from a handful of massive labels and sales networks they have even less connection to reality. I’ve never paid the slightest attention to them and to be honest I’d not even know where to look for them now. They have no connection to the music I like and buy.

 

[ToTo Man]

The charts haven’t represented anything of value since maybe the 1970s. In the 80s everything fragmented as the major chains lost market-share and non-chart-return indies became the main outlets for much of the best selling music of the time (punk, new-wave, indie, new-wave of British Heavy Metal, techno, drum & bass etc), plus jazz and classical specialists were always jazz and classical specialists. Really the pop charts only ever represented what kids bought from WH Smiths, HMV, Virgin and other major shifters. They never represented what was actually happening, plus they were exceptionally easy to manipulate with corporate pluggers etc.

These days the pop charts will just be streaming playlist-based in many ways. They are even more disconnected from the music people actually care about than they were in the past. The whole ‘charts’ thing was only ever corporate marketing/product-shilling. Since music has been democratised and freed from a handful of massive labels and sales networks they are absolutely meaningless. I’ve never paid the slightest attention to them and to be honest I’d not even know where to look for them now. They have no connection to the music I like and buy.

But were they not at least of some value to the artists? I'm thinking in terms of providing insight into which cities/countries they were more popular in so that they could plan their tour locations and extrapolate venue capacities accordingly, or was this granularity of detail never available from album sales data?

 

[Tony L]

But were they not at least of some value to the artists? I'm thinking in terms of providing insight into which cities/countries they were more popular in so that they could plan their tour locations and extrapolate venue capacities accordingly, or was this granularity of detail never available from album sales data?

I’d be amazed artists got any granular breakdown of the kind you describe as it was a corrupt and manipulated dataset. I’m sure we all remember the really cheap 99p 7” and CD singles etc near the counter at Our Price, Virgin, HMV etc. As I understand it that was 100% profit for the store, the singles had been dropped there as freebies to go through the chart-return tills etc. Basically shill product.

PS I’m really no expert on this as I was new-wave/indie-scene which is very much its own thing and had its own dealer network and eventually its own chart (actually several). At least as flawed but in different ways. Bands and labels producing their own stuff would have a pretty good idea where it was selling or not via reorders/returns, though sometimes this got masked a bit by distribution chains etc.