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Being dominant in the music business, however, is not just about numbers. It is about knowing. It is about having your ear to the ground (that is, listening to your customers as well as to reams of music) so that you can pick out which new acts will fly--whether they've received radio airplay or made their debut the night before in a local club or are selling a self-produced CD out of the trunk of a car. It is about bringing the artists you've found into your store to play and promoting them, literally, to beat the band. In short, it is about helping to create a marketplace rather than just reacting to one. "There are always retailers who sell what they stock, like a Newbury," says Harvard's Raman, "whereas others stock what they sell."

The competitive edge for a trendsetter like Newbury Comics is, essentially, time. There's a window of opportunity during which that retailer aggressively, and exclusively, sells new acts it has targeted--say, Days of the New in Dreese's case or Lyle Lovett in Kunz's--before they show up on the radar of larger retailers. "An account like Newbury really feels the sales on the front end of the record, in the initial stages of it," says Mark Cope, formerly senior vice-president of retail at the music-trade magazine Album Network. "They're out there at the edge, helping to break these artists. And their real profit comes in those first weeks, or whatever it is, of the process of breaking these artists."

In 1978, when Newbury Comics launched its first store (a converted studio apartment on Boston's trendy Newbury Street), that window was generally open for months. Record labels had to wait for retailers to begin shipping back returns to compile even rough sales figures. And news about actual sales that passed from sales reps to the labels or even to other retailers took time to react to and could be subject to distortions. (George Daniels, of 30-year-old George's Music Room, in Chicago, puts the lag at that time at one to two months.) But then, in 1991, SoundScan--with its POS systems and bar-coded CDs and dial-up phone lines--entered the picture. And that window began to close--so much so, says Dreese, that today the lag can be as little as eight days.

Here's the countdown: On Sunday night or Monday morning, retailers transmit to SoundScan a computer file of the exact number of units they sold of each title at each of their locations for the previous week. From the files of those approximately 15,000 stores (including some 600 independent retailers), SoundScan then compiles its reports. Those reports include everything from how many units of a particular title were sold in a particular city to what type of store the title was sold in (chain, independent, mass merchant, nontraditional) to the top 50 albums for the past week, broken down by label. (The depth of detail a label gets depends on the level of service it pays for.) On Wednesday morning, SoundScan releases those reports (they're now available on-line, with the use of passwords, at aud.soundscan.com) to its subscriber base and sends retailers a list of the top-100 sellers in their DMA. "So if we had, say, on a street date [when new records are released] of the previous Tuesday done very well with an obscure record, the following Wednesday everybody would know about it," says Dreese.

The hipper music stores don't care so much about the numbers; they're busy pushing their own unconventional inventory. But a Kmart or a Circuit City--now, that's another matter. Such mass-market retailers have to look no further than SoundScan's top-100 in the Boston DMA and their own inventory records to know that a certain title they don't have yet is flying fast off the shelves of another local retailer. "The new releases are where [Mike's] concerned--where his people step out and believe and embrace a new release," says CIMS's VanCleave. "And then chain guys don't pay anybody to do that. All they do is sit there and wait for the numbers to come in, and then they decide to order it. The way Mike's got it now, by not reporting, it may take his local chain competitors weeks to get the information."

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