Will Circuit City’s Liquidation Sales Actually Be A Boon For Artists’ SoundScan Numbers?

noah | December 23, 2008 11:30 am

A reader who’s been hitting up the Circuit City liquidation sales for some last-minute CD bargains was wondering if his buying of albums in bulk is helping the bands’ SoundScan tallies, what with the “everything must go” nature of the sales, but the actual nuts and bolts of the sales being taken over by a liquidation company. He writes:

So I went to a Circuit City on their last day open and bought a bunch of CDs to resell on Amazon. Got 5 copies of In Rainbows, 4 of Accelerate, a bunch of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah, etc.

Here’s my question: do those count as retail sales, even though they were $2 apiece? So if a bunch of people in the Southeast bought up Circuit City’s inventory of, say, In Rainbows in a week, will that show up as a bump of 3,000 or 4,000 in the Soundscans?

I asked Dan about this, and he said that he thought it was unlikely—”It takes a little bit of time to batch all that information and send it in. Plus they usually stop using the old [point-of-sale software], which probably automates most of the reporting.”—but some sort of further ruling would be nice, if only to give some last-minute hope to the Janet Jacksons and G-Units of the world.

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