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RIAA to Charge For StatisticsSeptember 6, 2009 -- That's right, the world's slowest and most deceiving sales reports will now require payment of a subscription to view. Of course, they're not really sales reports, just "shipment reports," but in the past, these things accompanied a press release. Another instance of seeing how much people will pay for what used to be free. Yesterday it was PR, today it's product. Or is it simply to limit the amount of people who can have access? The music business has always been big on artificial scarcity. And secret numbers. Most likely, they're going to pull some kind of scam with their numbers this year and it's best if people like me can't see it. This will be bad news for college students doing research. To help you, we (aka I) have our own section of RIAA statistics, which I never really updated this year because by the time the RIAA got around to releasing them, I was trying to finish off an album and we (the band) were playing out more often. As a result, when they finally showed up in April or May, I didn't really care what they said. We already had the overall picture from Nielsen -- in 2008, it sucked to be the RIAA. In the public interest, I'll update that section soon, with the most recent numbers available. I'm also going to add in a section from 1900 to the 1970's. And, since they want to hide numbers, it's time to look a little deeper for the real ones. This means going through the financial year-end reports. |
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