A press release from the Nielsen Company and Billboard titled "The Nielsen Company and Billboard’s 2009 Canadian Industry Report" isn't really about Canada's music industry as a whole but about album and single sales in Canada. That said, it's well worth a look.

What bothers me about these reports is that they only look at sales figures without providing the number of releases. So, for example, they say:

"Total Album sales declined 2.2% compared to 2008, continuing a trend of declining music sales in Canada."

But it's hard to know what that means without comparing the number of releases in those years. If we're focused on album sales, I have the general sense, though not the data, that there are less albums released each year and more emphasis on digital singles. And, in hip hop, much more energy going into mixtapes.

Without the data, that's speculative. So I appreciate the public release of this information but I wish they'd publicly correlate the sales to the titles that are tracked in the process. I assume they have that info and you could buy it from them but the general image of declining album sales without the check of number of releases helps support a public message of doom and gloom that may be even worse than the increasingly difficult reality.

But if you're deciding whether or not it's worth releasing an album and you're basing your decision on sales without comparing those figures to number of releases, you don't really have a basis for informed action. Of course, that's not all you want to consider but, knowing how folks interact in corporate meetings, I know all sorts of people will be dropping the declining sales figure in meetings to show off or justify their agenda, everybody will nod and then act based on that incomplete insight.