“The Way The Industry Measures ‘Album Sales’ Today is Ridiculous and Superstitious”

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Somewhere around the time male singers on MTV started dancing on chairs and the women started dressing up as Catholic school girls, I have to admit, I lost all interest in album sales. Well, that doesn’t mean I likewise relinquished interest in the aesthetics of all the pop stars, of course. 

Anyway, recent rhetoric on Kanye West’s sales of Donda made me perk my ears up again, at least enough to get a cursory understanding of the situation. This special interest in mine of Kanye, as a matter of fact, has more than a little to do with what I see as an overarching prejudice against him and any applicable artist as being “pompous” or “arrogant,” words I’ve also heard used to describe Eddie Vedder. I think that it’s their strong will and inviduality, that is, that has been a key catalyst in spawning the music that has changed our lives, basically. It’s to say you can’t come across that special, stormy vial of creation they’ve generated by subjugating yourself to others and following in the footsteps of what humanity wants from you. There’s a quote from the thoroughly ingenious Canadian rapper Noah23 that comes close to summing up what I’m saying: “I say overdo it / And do it yourself”. 

It was somewhat of a boon for me, then, to observe Kanye’s dizzying recent achievements in popularity pertaining to Donda, his new album from this year (and which I still haven’t listened to out of boycott of unscrupulous corprorate tactics, as I explain in a post from last week). Genius.com, anyway, has reported that West “is now one of just seven artists with 10 No. 1 albums” and that Donda “debuts with the biggest sales figures of 2021.” 

Well, I saw this term, sales figures, and my mind immediately inquired, “People still buy albums?” It’s very hard to imagine a situation in which a person in 2021 would purchase a CD whatsoever, other than maybe as some sort of antiquated found art joke type thing, pretentious commerce of Bob Marley – Legend and The Dark Side of the Moon notwithstanding for their unfortunate scrap of fabricated cultural merit. 

As it turns out, Genius reports that Donda in its first week enjoyed 359 million album streams (I presume that’s just measuring instances in which any song is streamed and not full-album run-throughs) “37,000 in digital album sales.” And I have to admit, that number is like 36,000 more than I could have sturdily predicted that figure to be, and indeed does seem pretty encompassing of a “blockbuster” album in 2021.

What sort of stuck in my craw, if you will, about the report on the industry’s current measuring mechanism of “sales,” likely spearheaded by the generally sovereign Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA) [1], is that they have this thing called “equivalent album units,” which is apparently a means toward simulating how many copies a particular album would have sold, pre-streaming. Or is it pre-downloading? Or is pre-MTV, pre-Communications Act of 1995, pre-lowering of the interest rates in the ’90s by Alan Greenspan?

Hopefully you get what I’m implying by this random list of events: it’s so arbitrary this attempted lunge at an objective environment for “album sales,” as sales seem to always be contingent on something that’s going on in our economy or society, as to make it a ridiculous thing to seek as an ideal. I say it’s superstitious, too, because the impetus for creating this “equivalent album sales” ultra-equalizer seems to be based in a paradigm that prizes competition, that prizes commerce and monetary gain, which, hopefully, we all know, is generally an attitude pretty deleterious of music or any fine art, or the quality thereof, as it were. It’s time to let go of the past and realize that 36,000 is online sales in a first week is a da** stalwart number in 2021 and it’s nothing that warrants embarrassment or hacked number-fudging for legitimacy. 

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[1] Granted, this ostensible incarnation of Big Brother is notorious for its licentious practices, according to one article I read, such as granting “platinum” status to pretty much every album by J. Cole, with all but complete ambivalence to his actual sales and streaming figures, equivalent or not.

30 thoughts on ““The Way The Industry Measures ‘Album Sales’ Today is Ridiculous and Superstitious”

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