Tracking CD sales

does anyone know of a Way to track CD sales by an artist in a specific region?..I'm working for a Band that has had a bad experience with their small indie label. They paid for 1/2 of their own CD duplication, not sure where (Discmakers, etc...) but they had over 2000 discs pressed up, but have seen NO MONEY from the sales out of actual record stores...the only $$ they see is from what they sell at their shows. So i want to help them figure out how many CD's they've sold TOTAL...
Its kinda hard to explain but basically i just need to know if theres a way for me to look into a database like soundscan and see how many CD's theyve sold...

Thanks in advance

Ainz

You can try to find somone to pull some soundscan numbers for you, but that's gonna be kinda hard, and you can't always rely on soundscan anyway. As a former owner of an indy record label I can tell you from experience that selling 2000 CDs is not going to generate any significant profits. Once you factor in manufacturing costs, and other costs like promotions, shipping, man hours, etc. it takes about 2000 sales just to re-coup the costs of the release. Once the sales numbers get to be up around 4000 is usually when the profits for an Indy label start to come in, but even then, it can take months and months for the label to get paid by the distributors and stores. I understand that it is very discouraging to the artisits, but that is the nature of the business. On top of all that, even if the record label shipped out 2000 CDs to stores or distributors, that doesnt mean that they sold 2000. Don't forget about returns. Lets say a store orders 10 copies of a cd, but only sells 2. After a certain amount of time, they are going to return the unsold copies either to the record label, or the distributor they bought them from. So don't think that copies are necessarily sold just because they shipped.

TBonus76 wrote:You can try to find somone to pull some soundscan numbers for you, but that's gonna be kinda hard, and you can't always rely on soundscan anyway. As a former owner of an indy record label I can tell you from experience that selling 2000 CDs is not going to generate any significant profits. Once you factor in manufacturing costs, and other costs like promotions, shipping, man hours, etc. it takes about 2000 sales just to re-coup the costs of the release. Once the sales numbers get to be up around 4000 is usually when the profits for an Indy label start to come in, but even then, it can take months and months for the label to get paid by the distributors and stores. I understand that it is very discouraging to the artisits, but that is the nature of the business. On top of all that, even if the record label shipped out 2000 CDs to stores or distributors, that doesnt mean that they sold 2000. Don't forget about returns. Lets say a store orders 10 copies of a cd, but only sells 2. After a certain amount of time, they are going to return the unsold copies either to the record label, or the distributor they bought them from. So don't think that copies are necessarily sold just because they shipped.

What he said and do this _>http://www.soundscan.com/register.html ASAP..

If the product already has a barcode and it is registered to that person, you will need to find out their ID and go from there. Get someone to do it for you (looking up #'s) because it's expensive doing it yourself - go to a friend label, dj, etc who has access.

With such a small run it should be easy....Contact the distributor for a list of where they went....If they did it themselves, just invoice the stores. They'll pay or return the unsold units or a combination of both....