Here’s How Billboard Stole ‘Christmas’ From the Charts : Pop music: The KROQ collection reaches No. 22 in album sales but gets no respect. It’s not ‘generally available’ so the magazine declines to list it.

This year’s charity cassette from KROQ-FM deejays Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter is one of the week’s bestsellers, but don’t look for it on Billboard magazine’s list of the nation’s top-selling albums.

Kevin & Bean’s “How the ----- Stole Christmas,” by such acts as Bush, Bjork, Bobcat Goldthwait and Henry Winkler, sold more than 76,000 copies last week. That made it the nation’s No. 22 best-selling album during the seven-day period ending last Sunday, according to SoundScan’s computerized sales monitoring system.

In Los Angeles, the collection unofficially called “How the Juice Stole Christmas,” benefits the Starlight Foundation of Southern California. It was No. 1, with more than quadruple the sales of the No. 2 album, “The Beatles Anthology 1.”

But the cassette, priced at $1.67 and available only in Southern California at the 132-store Wherehouse chain, was not “generally available” to all record stores, so Billboard declined to include it on any of its charts.

“If we allow albums to come on the charts that most stores cannot buy, it is not useful to the retailers,” says Michael Ellis, associate publisher of Billboard. “In fact, it would be a negative because they would possibly have [customers] asking them for albums they could not get, but maybe their competitor could. . . . The Billboard charts . . . are not merely a pure research tool to see exactly what were the best-selling albums.”

For instance, Ellis adds, catalog albums are not included in the Top 200. Last week, Kenny G’s year-old “Miracles: The Holiday Album” was the nation’s No. 3 seller, but it’s not listed on the Top 200 chart. Albums similar to Kevin and Bean’s have also been excluded, Ellis says.

All this came as a surprise to Kevin & Bean, whose “No Toys for O.J.” album showed up on the charts a year ago. (Ellis says a “glitch” allowed “No Toys” onto the chart last December.)

“We’re not making any money on this so it doesn’t impact us in any way other than the fact we’re disappointed that [the sales] are not accurately reflected,” Ryder says. “We didn’t realize that it was a subjective chart. They put on what they want to put on and leave off what they want to leave off.”

Adds Baxter: “It makes us wonder if everything Casey Kasem ever told us was a lie.”