Moses,
Thanks for going thru this cycle of inquiry.

I found it to start in an odd place, the "Gold Record". In my several decades of work the "recording industry" I don't recall anyone who really took it seriously. Everyone knew that any amount of happy sales figures could be bought or manufactured in lots of different ways, so the wall-placque was a nice, but corrupt symbol. BTW, the placques have to be bought from the RIAA. The award itself is merely the announcement, the hardware must be bought by the artists.

But you do come back around to what might have been a very substantive question, 'How do we keep score?', and you answer it, to some degree by saying that only the artists know the sales figures for certain, and btw, there are some areas where getting that info is very difficult. Now that's good. Chasing down
how artists can find all the money in their product chains is a very good topic for research and discussion.

So... why does anyone else need to know any artist's sales figures? Really?

The comparative measure of popularity by the old-style record industry functioned
completely for their own marketing conveniences, and was never a real measure of anyone's success. So who needs to know who's doing better than whom?

Exactly what processes that music artists, those who are not on major label contracts, go thru today need to be certified by sales figures? I really can't think of any. OK, well, maybe appearances on awards shows, which also can sometimes cost artists more than they pay off. As far as I know, there aren't any. Anything that an artist wants to do that has any 'gatekeeper' function in place qualifying access can be accomplished by simply paying money for it. And and artists who have the sales, it would follow, will have the money.

I guess this qualifies me as the "anarchist" that you mention early in your piece, but
I'm not an advocate of anarchy, I just watch the processes, and it looks to like the
"charts" and awards in your assumptions in this article, are remnants of a system that applies to a smaller and smaller pool of corporate artists. And that's fine, let 'em have it.

The real question in my mind is, why do we need this sort of measure, and what for?

It looks to me as though the people working at making music in the US now are so
very diverse, and are working their products and markets in such wonderfully innovative ways, that to seek to rebuild some hierarchical measure is not only an
enormous and difficult task to design and carry out, but doesn't really reflect what
the artists are achieving.

If the aggregate of folks selling original music products in the US now want a measure of this sort, they'll come up with one. Or many. But I just don't think that
it will follow the 'record industry' models that flourished so very corruptly from 1960 to the present.

Thanks,

stv