How do music companies determine # of albums sold?

Question by crashhhintome: How do music companies determine # of albums sold?
Nowadays with iTunes and online music stores, how do individual song purchases play into those numbers? Do actual CD sales still exceed online sales?

And how much of an impact has Peer2Peer sharing like Kazaa and limewire affected the music industry sales?

Best answer:

Answer by Apple Genius
At the moment sales are counted from both (legal) downloads and physical CD sales. If an individual song is purchased it is counted as a single. Only if the whole album is download it is counted as an album. Companies like Apple and Napster have to submit there records to the record companies and they sort out all the sales and charts.

Peer2Peer has a MASSIVE impact to the charts. You can’t track what songs have been downloaded due to the P2P technology. I buy all my songs from iTunes or I buy physical CD’s, unfortunately this is not everybody else’s choice and that is effecting the music industry

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