Quote:
Originally posted by Jaspurr
Yeah, the problem with MediaTraffic is that they never update sales after albums drop off of their album chart. But Lord's catalog sales are great, I mean she's sold another 1M copies of her other albums since the RED era began and I don't think Fearless will ever stop selling in the US.
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The problem with MediaTraffic is that
a) it is not accurate in anyway. It is just an estimate by a couple of German guys
b) they estimate sales in markets which do not have any accurate sales data
c) in the absence of an alternative, some folks act as if their data is accurate or an official chart/estimate.
When tracking sales data, some markets provide accurate sales data. The US is one of those. Most markets don't though. Mediatraffic just make up the data for these markets and this is neither verified or disputed or used by any official source.
When people give WW reciepts for someone like Rihanna they are just going off estimates. They have little solid data except for those markets where data is solid (such as the US).
Digital sales are actually the most accurate measure of sales, because they actually tracks sales and actual sales (close to real time) and not shipments.
Personally I don't really give much credence to mediatraffic at all simply because it cannot be accurate, because the guys who give the figures simply do not have the data at hand to be accurate.
The IFPI are the only real official figures used by the industry for global sales but even they use shipments instead of actual sales. This is because they simply don't have the actual sales data available for their global report. They also don't use Mediatraffic for the reasons I stated.
I tend to put more focus on the US market sales data because
a) the US is the biggest market
b) the US is by far the most important and influential market globally
c) the data for the US market is reliable and well reported.
The utter delusion 
) because I feel like that will give the single enough time to run its course and then she can release something else last week of Septmeber and album Oct. 13.
such a holy hymn