revamped their analysis by adding marketshare breakdown by label ownership," an A2IM representative told Digital Music News today. “It reveals that independent labels collectively lead the market with 31.2% of album and TEA sales [for the first half of this year]." 'TEA' stands for 'track equivalent albums,' a highly-questionable counting method that essentially gloms 10 tracks (last we checked) into a full album. At presstime, we were unable to receive a cleaner, straight album total.
A2IM president Richard Bengloff has been stumping for this change for years. The reason is that indies frequently work through major-owned distribution groups, and those releases end up getting counted towards that major's market share. Which distorts the figures and lowers leveraging power. “Over the years, reporting based on distribution has allowed major labels who claim independent marketshare to inflate their positions in repertoire deals with companies entering the music space, and settlements with infringers; and has cost independent labels, and their artists, hundreds of millions of dollars."
In other words, this marketshare total—sent to us by Soundscan last month—is essentially a work of fiction.
So, instead of 12.57%, Bengloff is now popping the champagne on a more-than-doubled figure.
But something tells us this isn't quite baked, especially since we've only heard from one side so far. Is Nielsen Soundscan—the longtime data sycophant to the majors—ready to rule indies as the dominant player? We asked Nielsen, and they declined to answer that question, and even A2IM has yet to follow-up on our many questions.
We'll report more as we know it, including any additional information from Bengloff.
