Quote:
Originally posted by Eternium
Billboard doesn't count VEVO views in SEAs yet but does that mean they're not streams?  Nielsen Soundscan also didn't count the second-biggest source for music sales, Tower Records, for how many years? They didn't even bother to track iTunes till 2003 (?) or add it to the Hot 100 till like 2005. Billboard never even got around to club sales because they wouldn't pay Nielsen Soundscan to join. Do those hundreds of millions of sales not count because Billboard was slow on the draw? 
Your single sales analogy is a little backwards. If an album from 1995 was released this decade, then its equivalents total would be the same, but the demographic of its sales would be changed, with single sales/streams taking a higher percentage and album sales tumbling. If we were to follow the "adjustment" method, then wouldn't we have crazy single sales? If 2012 had 14x higher single sales than 2004, then what would single sales look like from that year? Hollaback Girl would've sold 6,578,521 in a year and would be well over 12M singles sold in just the U.S. by now. Imagine where the physical singles would be  Have you even tried your method for single sales yet?
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Digital Track Sales (in millions)
2012: 1.336 billion (3.78x as big)
2005: 353 million
Hollaback Girl sold
1.2 million in 2005, adjusted to 2012 that would be 4.54 million, that's perfectly reasonable
Obviously this wouldn't work with physical CD singles when most big hits didn't even get a single release, making the physical singles market artificially low. Cute how you left that out, tho
