TEA (Track Equivalent Albums)
January 16, 2009 at 4:32 am | In Music Business | 2 CommentsTags: albums, digital, download, Gold, Platinum, RIAA Certification, Scans, TEA, Track Equivalent
There is a rather large misunderstanding (at least in my company) regarding how individually downloaded songs scan. This is a lesson I’ve taught in multiple meetings and I suspect I’ll have to teach in many more. TEA (Track Equivalent Albums) is only a great concept as long as it is properly understood and communicated. It helps to quickly estimate the amount of revenue generated by a project, which can help in assessing whether or not a project is successful or not and simplifies most label reporting for easier sales analysis.
So How Does TEA work?
Most corporations formulate TEA by dividing the number of track sales by 10. Let’s take Coldplay (featured excerpt from Nielsen Soundscan below) for example. The 2.786 Million tracks have a TEA value of approximately 278.6K Albums.
2.786 Million / 10 (avg # tracks on an album) = 278.6K Track Equivalent Albums
3 Things to Remember about TEA
- It is only an estimate (Any given album could have more or less than 10 tracks)
- Single song downloads never add up to equal a real album scan
- Per the second bullet – Single Song downloads do not help an artist’s record get any closer to gold or platinum status
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[...] As a matter of fact, according to Ken, 2008 revenue is “30% below” that of the year 2000 so Americans certainly didn’t buy more music “than ever before”. A consumer may buy 5 songs from 5 different artists and therefore consume more types of music and perhaps even execute 5 entirely different monetary transactions, but only generate about half of the revenue that an album would generate in addition to only buying about half of the musical content found on one typical album (see TEA). [...]
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[...] when you meant to scan 150K, but your tracks sales, which don’t count towards scans (see TEA) tally 500K because you had a hit single at radio, what have you lost? You may need to readjust [...]
Pingback by Ships vs. Scans vs. Revenue « Digital Media Digest — January 21, 2009 #