Luminate (formerly Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen Music Products, and MRC Data) is a provider of music sales

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...

. Established by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett in 1991, data is collected weekly and made available every Sunday (for albums sales) and every Monday (for songs sales) to subscribers, which include record companies, publishing firms, music retailers, independent promoters, film and TV companies, and artist managers. It is the source of sales information for the ''Billboard'' music charts. It is owned by PMRC, a joint venture between

Eldridge Industries Eldridge Industries LLC is an American holding company headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, with offices in New York City, London, and Beverly Hills. Eldridge makes investments in various industries including insurance, asset management, tech ...

(publisher of ''Billboard'') and

Penske Media Corporation Penske Media Corporation (PMC) () is an American digital media, publishing, and information services company based in Los Angeles and New York City. It publishes more than 20 digital and print brands, including '' Variety'', ''Rolling Stone'', ...

. The company operates the analytics platform Music Connect, Broadcast Data Systems (which tracks airplay of music), and Music 360.

History

Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales data for Nielsen on March 1, 1991. The May 25 issue of ''

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...

'' published ''Billboard'' 200 and Country Album charts based on SoundScan "piece count data," and the first Hot 100 chart to debut with the system was released on November 30, 1991. Previously, ''Billboard'' tracked sales by calling stores across the U.S. and asking about sales—a method that was inherently error-prone and open to outright fraud. Indeed, while transitioning from the calling to tracking methods, the airplay and sales charts (already monitored by Nielsen) and the Hot 100 (then still using the calling system) often did not match (for instance

Paula Abdul Paula Julie Abdul (born June 19, 1962) is an American singer, dancer, choreographer, actress, and television personality. She began her career as a cheerleader for the Los Angeles Lakers at the age of 18 and later became the head choreograp ...

's "

Promise of a New Day "The Promise of a New Day" is the second single (and lead-off track) from American artist Paula Abdul's album '' Spellbound''. The song was written by Paula Abdul, Peter Lord and V. Jeffrey Smith. The single was released to radio while the hit " ...

" and

Roxette Roxette was a Swedish pop rock duo, consisting of Marie Fredriksson (vocals and keyboards) and Per Gessle (vocals and guitar). Formed in 1986, the duo became an international act in the late 1980s, when they released their breakthrough second ...

's "

Fading Like a Flower "Fading Like a Flower (Every Time You Leave)" is a song by Swedish pop rock duo Roxette from their third studio album, '' Joyride'' (1991). Written by Per Gessle and produced by Clarence Öfwerman, the song was released as the second single from ...

" reached much higher Hot 100 peaks than their actual sales and airplay would have allowed them to). Although most record company executives conceded that the new method was far more accurate than the old, the chart's volatility and its geographical balance initially caused deep concern, before the change and the market shifts it brought about were accepted across the industry.

Tower Records Tower Records is an international retail franchise and online music store that was formerly based in Sacramento, California, United States. From 1960 until 2006, Tower operated retail stores in the United States, which closed when Tower Recor ...

, the country's second-largest retail chain, was originally not included in the sample because its stores were equipped with different technology to measure sales. At first, some industry executives complained that the new system—which relied on high-tech sales measurement rather than store employee estimates—was based on an inadequate sample, one that favored established and mainstream acts over newcomers. The

Recording Industry Association of America The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/ ...

also tracks sales (or more specifically, shipments minus potential returns) on a long-term basis through the RIAA certification system; it has never used either Nielsen SoundScan or the store-calling method. The first ''Billboard'' Hot 100 number-one song via Nielsen SoundScan was " Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" by P.M. Dawn. Other changes would also largely impact the Hot 100 in the future, consisting of radio-only songs being able to chart in 1998, and YouTube views playing part of how a Hot 100 is decided in 2013. In December 2019,

Valence Media Valence or valency may refer to: Science * Valence (chemistry), a measure of an element's combining power with other atoms * Degree (graph theory), also called the valency of a vertex in graph theory * Valency (linguistics), aspect of verbs re ...

, the current parent company of ''Billboard'', acquired Nielsen's music data business, reuniting it with ''Billboard'' for the first time since its spin-off to E5 Global Media from Nielsen Business Media. It was renamed MRC Data in 2020 after

merged Valence with the film and television studio MRC. and was then brought under its PMRC joint venture with

as P-MRC Data. It was renamed once more to Luminate Data in March 2022. In August 2022, the MRC merger was unwound, with Eldridge Industries taking sole ownership of its stake in PMRC.

Tracking

Sales data from

cash register A cash register, sometimes called a till or automated money handling system, is a mechanical or electronic device for registering and calculating transactions at a point of sale. It is usually attached to a drawer for storing cash and other ...

s is collected from 14,000 retail, mass merchant, and non-traditional (on-line stores, venues, digital music services, etc.) outlets in the United States, Canada, UK and Japan. The requirements for reporting sales to Nielsen Music are that the store has Internet access and a

point of sale The point of sale (POS) or point of purchase (POP) is the time and place at which a retail transaction is completed. At the point of sale, the merchant calculates the amount owed by the customer, indicates that amount, may prepare an invoice f ...

(POS) inventory system. Submission of sales data must be in the form of a

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

consisting of all the UPCs sold and the quantities per UPC on a weekly basis. Sales collected from Monday-Sunday or Sunday-Saturday are reported every Monday and made available to subscribers every Wednesday. Anyone selling a music product with its own UPC or ISRC may register that product to be tracked by Luminate.

Sales calculation

Not all retailers participate in the SoundScan program, so total CD sales are projected from the collected data using a statistical calculation called "

weighting The process of weighting involves emphasizing the contribution of particular aspects of a phenomenon (or of a set of data) over others to an outcome or result; thereby highlighting those aspects in comparison to others in the analysis. That i ...

". This assigns a multiplier to each category of stores, to compensate for the number of similar stores not covered by the sampling program. Sales in each category are multiplied accordingly. Such a system is vulnerable to exploitation if it is known which stores are included in the sampling program. To inflate their reported chart sales, some indie labels were reported to purposefully target stores in the program for on-site sales promotions. Also, other labels were found shipping boxes of their CDs to be scanned by complicit retailers in the program.

Impact

The incorporation of SoundScan tracking by the ''Billboard'' charting system was cited by the industry as a possible cause of the early '90s popularization of

alternative music Alternative music may refer to the following types of music: *Alternative rock *Alternative pop * Alternative R&B *Neo soul, sometimes known as alternative soul *Alternative reggaeton * Alternative hip hop *Alternative dance *Alternative metal * Ch ...

in the United States. An explanation floated was that the previous call system under-represented marginal genres. Under SoundScan, more accurate data on alternative music sales allowed these acts to appear higher in the ''Billboard'' charts than before, and their chart success helped increase the genre's popularity. In addition, SoundScan sales data quickly found use in the promotion departments at major record labels, to persuade radio station music directors to play tracks by high-selling alternative artists such as

Nirvana ( , , ; sa, निर्वाण} ''nirvāṇa'' ; Pali: ''nibbāna''; Prakrit: ''ṇivvāṇa''; literally, "blown out", as in an oil lamp Richard Gombrich, ''Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benāres to Modern Colombo. ...

References

External links