What was revealed by the introduction of soundscan in 1991

Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Skip to content. Those, including The Triplets, no longer seemed like such sure things. On the Top Pop Albums chart dated May 25, , the first compiled with SoundScan data, Thicker Than Wate r fell — not just down the album sales chart, but off of it entirely. The center couldn't hold. As soon as Thicker Than Water fell off the chart, the Triplets' radio support vanished.

And that was months before that chart adopted SoundScan data that fall. It was as if the band had a scarlet number — or a lack of one. By changing the way music sales were counted, SoundScan changed the way music was sold. It established a clear and transparent way to count sales that couldn't easily be gamed by stores, which in turn changed the practice of tabulating sales "from a subjective methodology to an objective methodology," says Jim Caparro , former president of Polygram Group Distribution.

Hype didn't help as much anymore. It was like the emperor had no clothes. For decades before SoundScan, the Billboard albums chart had been based on ranked lists from retailers and one-stop distributors.

It was "Heisman Trophy voting — the most points go to No. Until , the ranked sales lists from stores weren't adequately weighted, so that sales from Musicland's stores only counted several times as much as those of a mom-and-pop shop. Back then, "there was a belief that the charts dictated behavior instead of the charts being a reflection of that behavior," Mayfield remembers. But getting the point-of-sale data SoundScan needed wasn't easy: It required outfitting every major U.

When the data came in, the biggest surprise was how well older albums continued to sell. For years, retailers and one-stop distributors had omitted catalog albums when they sent ranked sales lists to Billboard. SoundScan didn't, though. To separate out the new releases, Mayfield says he "spent the good part of two weekends, plus some late weekdays with reams of sales reports from SoundScan and the latest Joel Whitburn [chart statistics] book to figure out which titles should be flagged as catalog.

You could say that SoundScan saw these various genre revolutions coming. Or you could say that SoundScan, and virtually every chart improvement Billboard would make going forward, helped everyone see that those revolutions had already happened. Everybody was scrambling to keep the record in stock. Because it turns out even Geffen Records, the major label that brought you Nevermind , was guessing, even with Nevermind itself. That Nirvana album is freaking amazing. I told you it was gonna blow up!

What gave SoundScan crucial early credibility, of course, was that Billboard itself bought in. SoundScan perfected the formula and got record stores on board faster; Billboard , founded in to cover the advertising and bill-posting industries, had the industry clout to give these new numbers legitimacy. The business needed it, too.

It is tempting to dismiss the pre-SoundScan music industry as a lawless and artless quagmire with pure corruption the only founding principle.

But at first SoundScan was less a moral improvement than a mechanical one: The bar-code system was simpler and far more accurate, simple as that. From Kurt Cobain to, uh, Sebastian Bach , the immediate winners of the SoundScan era are well known at this point, but who lost? Who did not benefit, immediately, from greater chart accuracy? Some dizzying drops even in that very first week in May felt arbitrary and undeserved.

She was a great background singer who sang for Luther Vandross, and she sang with the Rolling Stones on their tours. She was really talented, and she had an appealing album. Well, he was, but not anymore. I go back to my movie metaphor: Albums open big and then fall off unless they are lucky enough to generate five singles. Maybe, maybe not. Country music as a whole, in fact, got an immediate, startling boost. There had been 20 the week before. There were nine in the top 50; there had been three the week before.

Indeed, Hank Williams Jr. The Nashville machine as a whole, meanwhile, was delighted by the brighter spotlight SoundScan brought to country music, even if nobody was especially surprised. This is the first SoundScan Singles Sales Top 10 published by Billboard magazine on 8 June Note: the number in brackets indicates the position on the Hot the same week. On the official Top the album peaked at 3. If the switch to SoundScan happened a month earlier, today Garth would have an additional US chart topper.

Ironically "No Fences" became his biggest selling album. Sun July 2, , Here are a few examples of what I mentioned. I'm sure there are more though.

The first two examples are especially bad! I'll see if I can come up with some examples of under-reporting. The only one I have so far is Crystal Waters - Makin' Happy which didn't make the Hot , despite making airplay 58 and sales 55! It must not have been getting much payola!

Maybe that's why it got under-reported! Thanks for the list JM. Yes, there was some serious problems with accuracy, that the actual sales chart and airplay charts revealed. Some would have been underreporting, and some probably due to the actual system Billboard used for compiling the Hot Even Billboard knew this by the late 80s, as pop music fractured into genres and sub-genres.

I think Billboard ran a campaign to get stores and radio stations to report songs, but they appear to have been largely unsuccessful. Incidentally, would anyone know if the stores used to compile the Sales Chart by Soundscan and the radio stations used to compile the Airplay chart by BDS were the exact same ones used to compile the Hot during that same period in , when there were these discrepancies?

I just checked Roxette and you were right, there's another example of over-reporting there.