Duping the press, music-industry edition

Earlier this week, we asked the mediabistro.com readership to tantalize us with tales of systematic attempts by entertainment companies to mislead the journalists who cover them. Here’s something from the music business. A reader writes:

If you go the the RIAA website, which is the tradegroup for music, you’ll see that they list all their number in terms of “units shipped”. This is basically a BS number, because stores can return anything they don’t sell. As a result, except for SoundScan (which charges for information) it is almost impossible to figure out how many copies of an album are sold, which record companies love because they can tell people that they’ve shipped a gazillion albums, when they actually only sold 15.

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