Sharer Beware

Tweet

"If Newbury Comics' information shows the trends and what's breaking out there, not just to the record labels, but to...Musicland or Trans World or whomever, they can make their buying decisions based on information that is funneled into SoundScan for that market," adds Mark Cope. "You have to remember, those larger accounts are dealing with very tight open-to-buy budgets--which means that they have a specific budget that they can spend each month on buying product. So they have to be right more times than they're wrong. And so they're taking every bit of information they can in order to ensure that they're putting the right records in the right stores at the right time."

Mike Dreese has experienced the power of SoundScan to get the "right" records in the "right" stores. In 1997 Newbury Comics' own label, Wicked Disc, released a charity CD called the "WBCN Naked Disc," which featured previously unreleased performances by alternative bands like the Verve Pipe, Beck, Bush, and Tori Amos. Dreese and his colleagues tried their mightiest to get the record into retail outlets other than Newbury Comics, but some national chains, like Strawberries (which is owned by Trans World), wouldn't bite. And then the top-100 list for the Boston DMA came out for the week ending November 24, 1997: "Naked Disc" ranked number 63, with some 800 copies sold. Within one week of the release of the first SoundScan numbers, the ranking had jumped to number 28--a clear sign that additional retailers had picked up on the title. And by the week ending December 21, 1997, it had soared to number 13, with a whopping 5,800-plus copies sold. "When you see a number pop the way that one did in the Boston market," says Dreese, the chains "are forced to respond because all their store managers are saying that people want this. They look then at SoundScan and see that it's sold thousands of units and realize they really do need to bring it in."

Dreese was aware that his window of opportunity had shrunk to a crack when he headed to the New Hampshire convention in September 1997. But when he heard the Handleman rep "making these grandiose statements about the prowess of Handleman based on SoundScan as a tool," he feared that the window could slam shut. "It's very clear that now versus five years ago, retailers of every ilk have become a lot more sophisticated about using market-specific data to program the shelves of their stores," says Dreese. "So as the potential users of this [data] increasingly used it to good effect, we had to ask ourselves, 'Are we a beneficiary or a net loser in this information-transfer scheme?"

SoundScan chief operating officer Mike Shalett is not an easy man to reach. Just ask any independent retailer who's tried to establish a dialogue with him--John Kunz of Waterloo Records, for instance. But once you get Shalett on the telephone, he can't say enough about how Mike Dreese has no edge over other retailers, even very large ones, when it comes to picking up early on a new act and putting it on his shelves. If Dreese knows about it, Shalett says, so does everyone else--because they've heard it on local radio or read about it in local reviews. "I want to be clear about the breaking-the-act part," says Shalett over his car phone en route from Hartsdale to New York City. "The Boston Phoenix hasn't reviewed the record? [Boston radio stations] WBCN or 'AAF or none of these people are playing this record? You know, it's amazing, using this logic, that the record company even signed the act."

The trendsetting retailers, of course, beg to differ. Music Millennium's Terry Currier notes that his two stores helped to break, among others, the singer-songwriter Elliott Smith and guitar ace Richard Thompson as a soloist--and Thompson "has never received any airplay in this town at all," Currier adds. Waterloo's John Kunz cites rock musician Stevie Ray Vaughan and alterna-pop group Fastball as two acts that, he says, "unequivocally" broke out in his 55-employee establishment. And Carl Singmaster, owner of $10-million Manifest Discs & Tapes, which comprises six stores in the Carolinas, points to 2 Skinnee J's ("We sold hundreds of copies, before they were ever signed, before they ever had one spin on radio," he says) and pop stars Hootie & the Blowfish, hometown boys that Singmaster first heard in a club and on the band's own self-produced tapes.

Shalett isn't shy about discrediting the window of opportunity Mike Dreese is so worried about losing. "You know what?" he says. "[Newbury Comics is] a retailer. And we're not giving them an exclusive position to sell records. Last I looked, that would be a violation of fair trade....The issue is not about SoundScan. The issue is that [Mike Dreese] would like a two-week window on selling records."

Retailers, Shalett insists, know what their competitors are selling not because of SoundScan's DMA reports or because the labels fax them immediate downloads from SoundScan's Web page but because record-label salespeople talk. They talk to other retail customers, and they talk to the labels about who's ordering what. Here's how Shalett puts it: "Do you think that the salesman for Sony Music or WEA Distribution if, all of a sudden, argumentatively speaking, Michael Dreese has taken in a box of 25 copies of the Goo Goo Dolls, and he now calls back the distributor and says, 'Hey, I need 25 more copies of the Goo Goo Dolls,' and the guy says, 'Well, what's up?' 'Oh, hey, I'm doing really good with these.' Don't you think he calls Strawberries? Don't you think he calls the Harvard Coop?"

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: