i remember when the third smashing pumpkins album came out it was reported to have supposedly sold x number of copies that just seemed way to high and i then read that the industry basically counted it twice since it was a double album. i just casually googled and saw this
"There are many things wrong with the Recording Industry Association of America’s system for certifying albums gold, platinum, multiplatinum, and (now) diamond. There’s the counting of records shipped, not sold; I’ve seen discs certified platinum that have actually SoundScanned fewer than 700,000 copies. On the other side of the ledger, there are discs that are under-certified because of the RIAA’s outmoded system requiring labels to request certification—short-changing dozens of classic Motown artists, for example.
But nothing in the RIAA metals methodology sticks in my craw more than double-counting. It’s the biggest scam in record-industry self-tallying, and the main reason it’s infuriating is the very example cited above: journalists and music fans the world over use the RIAA’s certs as their yardstick for all-time album sales. It’s basically a total distortion of rock history.
When you buy one copy of a double album, you give that album two sales toward its RIAA total. Buy a five-disc box set, and your sale is multiplied by five. So while, say, Houses of the Holy had to sell one million copies in 1973 to go platinum, the four-disc Led Zeppelin box set had to sell just 250,000 in 1990 to get the same certification.
Never mind the most basic illogic of this system: the length of a disc has changed in the conversion from vinyl to CD, for one thing; and you can’t buy just one disc of a set, so why should each disc be counted as if it’s an individual sale? Even the industry’s seemingly more reasonable rationale—that a more expensive set deserves a higher certification—doesn’t hold up, because the multiple-counting happens regardless of what you actually paid. For example, OutKast’s 2003 smash Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, priced by BMG and most retailers as a single-disc item, gets double-counted by the RIAA even though many people paid under $12 for both discs.
Garth Brooks famously milked the double-counting system a decade ago by putting out numerous low-priced multidisc releases—a $10 live set, boxes of his old albums remastered—in his (failed) quest to pad his career total and take first place on the all-time list of most-certified acts from the Beatles. (Who, to be fair, have also benefited mightily from double-counting—we’ll get to the White Album in a minute.)"
i dont know if this applies to charts the way it does to industry certification but it might suggest so
