... the RIAA tracks sales as units shipped to stores, whereas Soundscan tracks sales as scanned bar-codes sold at a cash register. The RIAA's numbers show that albums shipped to stores has been decreasing but Soundscan's numbers show about a 9% *increase* in sales over last year.Yes, that's right, tracking actual sales at stores shows record sales as increasing.
The cause, Avalon supposes, is that record stores are managing inventory better, moving to an "just-in-time" system where only a few weeks of inventory is held, resulting in fewer CDs "ordered but not sold" (eventually returned to the distributor). Simply put, stores are better at ordering what they're going to sell, so that overall, they over-order less often while selling more overall. In fact, this efficiency increase should be a great boon to record companies, as it means fewer returns, less shipping costs, and fewer units manufactured that end up not being sold.
Olivier Travers picks this up, too.
