Luminate claims ‘consensus’ but Indies still want delay in Billboard Chart sales data changes

Luminate will proceed with changes in how it counts physical sales from independent music stores used to calculate the Billboard Charts despite significant pushback from the independent community.

Yesterday, Luminate told Billboard it would proceed with the changes on December 29th claiming “a consensus that the current weighted modeling should be retired.”

But several prominent representatives of the independent music community tell Hypebot that there is no consensus that the shift should be made now.

“While I do believe there is a consensus from many facets of the industry (including us) that we would all love to have a scenario where there is no need for the weighted model, that is not the reality of the world we are living in,” said Andrea Paschal, Executive Director of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CIMS) and ThinkIndie Distribution. “The part of that consensus that Luminate conveniently fails to mention in their statement is that the retirement of said model should have come only after Luminate had increased their indie reporters significantly.”

Luminate plans to shift from a modeled methodology, which takes sales from a sampling of stores and applies weighting to calculate total sales, to a direct representation of sales reported by U.S. and Canadian indie retailers. However, coalitions of indie stores, labels, distributors, and vinyl manufacturers united in recent weeks saying that the change would collapse indie sales figures since only 5% or 72 of the estimated 1400 indie stores report sales to Luminate.

Luminate argues that reporting from these stores – an estimated 72 out of 1400 – represents as much as 93% of all US and Canadian sales.

“minimal outreach or resources”

“The coalitions were very active in their outreach over a period of 18 months trying to work with them (Luminate) to increase reporters,” Paschal continued. “Since their announcement of the change, I have seen minimal outreach or resources pointed toward this effort from Luminate’s side, and they still only have a fraction of the stores accounted for, therefore making this change premature. If the accuracy of data is the end result Luminate is looking for, I do not believe they will achieve it with this decision.”

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.