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Vinyl Sales Keep Growing — So Why Does It Look Like They’ve Dropped?

Record stores have stopped reporting vinyl sales for Billboard charts as part of a boycott to data provider Luminate's new system.

“We are extremely disappointed that Luminate chose to stop weighting indie retail sales without launching a serious program to enlist store reporting and to count the physical market,” Matador Records president Patrick Amory wrote in an email. When the major record companies decided to change the official day for new music releases from Tuesday in the U.S. to a worldwide Friday street date in 2014, “indie stores told labels, ‘You are killing us,’” recalls the major-label executive. As part of its plans to calculate actual sales instead of extrapolating them from a weighted sample, Luminate revealed in October that it had identified 570 indie accounts — with, industry sources say, the aid of labels, distributors and store coalitions — that it wanted to add as reporters.

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