Make Your CD Sales Count with SoundScan
By Matthew Toledo - 8/22/2006
If you sold a couple of thousand CD's in Athens, wouldn't you want someone outside of this general area to know about it? Wouldn't you want music promoters and venue owners to know how many potential fans you can bring to a show? What if your long-term desires or to tour nationally or even shop for labels? If you answered yes to any of these questions you'll want to register your music with SoundScan.
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SoundScan is owned by the Dutch media conglomerate, VNU. This is the same company that owns the Nielsen ratings company and the Billboard music charts. SoundScan tracks the sales of audio records at over 17,000 retail stores in the United States. They sell the information that they gather to all sorts of people. Record labels use the data to track how their bands are doing and they also use it to track and sign up-and-coming new artists. Concert promoters use the information to help determine who they will book at certain larger venues. (wikipedia)
When SoundScan was created over a decade ago, it almost instantaneously negated the affect that payola scams had the record charts. Payola is the act of paying someone cash to play your record. Prior to 1991, charts like Billboard asked radio stations and record stores to track their spins and sales by hand. This method of data collection was highly susceptible to corruption by promoters who would pay radio stations and record stores to artificially inflate their band's number of on-air spins and record store sales. After the switch to SoundScan there was an immediate increase in the number of breakout bands. Suddenly metal, country, and hip-hop acts appeared from nowhere and started climbing the charts. These bands were selling better than people originally thought, but were they under-represented in the charts because these folks in these genres typically couldn't afford to grease the palms of radio stations and record stores. (ask yahoo)
According to digitalmusicnews.com, SoundScan also tracks sales on digital music stores like iTunes, Sony Connect, CDON.com, MSN, Virgin, MTV, MyCokeMusic.com, Panasonic, Tiscali, eMusic, as well as OD2 and its affiliates. (Resnikoff)
Every local artist who releases a CD should register their band with SoundScan prior to the release. By doing this, you'll ensure that every retail sale will put a plus mark in SoundScan's tally. It's fairly easy to get started. There is a simple word document or PDF file that you can download directly from their web site. Just fill it out and send it back to them. 10 to 15 days later, they will start tracking your sales.
The only requirement you need to fufill in order to take advantage of SoundScan is to assign your CD a UPC barcode. A professional CD manufacturer like Disc Makers can assign your disk one for an additional fee. Online distributions services like CD Baby and TuneCore can also assign your disk a perfectly valid barcode.
Further Reading:
Distribute Your Music World-Wide with TuneCore
References:
"How Does SoundScan Work to Calculate the Number of Albums Sold?" Ask Yahoo. 15 Feb. 2002. 21 Aug. 2006 <http://ask.yahoo.com/20020215.html>.
Resnikoff, Paul, ed. "Soundscan Broadens Downloading Sources in Europe." Digital Music News. 25 Jan. 2006. 21 Aug. 2006 <http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/results?title=Soundscan>.
"VNU." Wikipedia. 21 Aug. 2006. 22 Aug. 2006 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VNU>.
