"Arny Krueger" wrote:

Doing the math:

About 28,000 copies per average CD title.

Chris Rossi wrote:
I'd guess that taking the mean here is going to be a bit misleading.
The vast majority of CDs that are released every year are on small
independent labels. Sales of a few thousand copies or less are faily
common. The average is skewed by the relative handful of titles that
get mainstream success and sell in the millions. The median might
actually be more useful a characterization but would require raw data
to calculate.

But you have to remember that Arny's number was based on this industry
statistic:

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/4352.cfm claims that in 2001 27,000
CD titles were released (most recent data I could find)

http://www.audiorevolution.com/news/...dvda_sacd.html says that 756
million CDs were sold in 2003.

I suspect that the 27,000 CD titles released in 2001 did not include
every independent release that sells typically in the hundreds at best.
I suspect that these numbers are only representative of the
RIAA-represented labels.

This suspicion is supported by the context of Arny's statistic:
"In 1999 38,900 individual titles were released in the US. The number
of releases fell by 30% by 2001 when only 27,000 titles were released."

Surely in the time period from 1999 to 2001, at the absolute pinnacle
of the cheap home-recording gear revolution, the number of
self-released titles woul have substantially increased, not decreased.
I have been saying for a while now that the RIAA deliberately excludes
data on these types of releases.

Still, your point is valid. For every triple-platinum smash hit the
majors release, they put out another several dozen albums that fail
miserably, or see modest sales at best. The numbers bear this out
easily. If you have even a few platinum album in the count, imagine
how poorly the other releases have to sell to get the average down to
28,000.

ulysses