[darktruth]

Source: Music Network (Industry Magazine)

The Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) announced this week details on the bust up between 3 major record sale stores which unfolded Wednesday. HMV, Sanity and Virgin Music, with a combined stake of almost half of the total sales in Australia, last week revealed that they would no longer participate in the ARIA sales chart.

Reasons for this were not confirmed until this week when John Zalinger, sales and distribution manager of Brazin Limited told us that the Australian Broadcast Authority and ARIA refused to meet the needs of all companies involved in regards to a sponsorship of the already member supported chart and change to the reporting system of the chart.

"Brazin Limited does not support a fully digital system where charts are calculated weekly, and not daily. We require daily reporting and figures to support our sales intakes to our stores", Mr Zalinger said.

For ARIA this now means that 49% of Australia's sales will not be included in the "official chart". This is shown on the first released chart in a week, where accreditation status remains unchanged and chart positions are steady. ARIA has refused to comment on the situation, but has been reportedly making steps towards changing elements of the chart reporting system.

Mr Zalinger continued to say that "they (ARIA) refuse to listen to their members, and as a result almost half of their sales figures have been withdrawn from their reports. It's not a loss to ARIA, its a loss to those artists - especially Australian artists, in which our companies fully support, who will have trouble charting from the remaining retail chains who are still surveyed by ARIA. This is a big blow to the Australian Recording Industry".

Only 4 big players remain in survey, those of which are Big W, Kmart, Target and Leading Edge.

I know this news has been a bit late but the news of stores like HMV, Sanity and Virgin Music no longer contributing to the ARIA charts seems very interesting seeing as how they have a big part in the sales figure of the singles and albums.

It's also evident that sales of singles and albums have been declining rapidly as more are turning to paid downloads now. This is very interesting seeing how most of us said in the other thread that we prefer buying the actual physical cd's than legally downloading it but the music charts in the UK and US shows the opposite. Now it appears the Australian music charts may be following in the footsteps of the US if they choose to incorporate digital downloads towards the full chart system.

Basically the current single charts in Australia is very low that it only takes up about 4000-5000 cd single sales to be in the national top 10. I think it's around the same amount for an album as well.

So it looks like the retail stores are beginning to feel the pain with the increase in digital downloads. I get the feeling they're using the reason in the article as a cover for the low sales of the cd's.