Does SoundScan Count en Espan~ol ?

There’s no question that the rock en espan~ol market is growing steadily in the U.S. “Suen~os Liquidos,” the new album by the Guadalajara-based band Mana, one of the top acts in the genre, has given solid proof, with SoundScan reporting first-week sales of more than 17,000 and a four-week total now of nearly 40,000.

That’s very respectable for an act that gets virtually no “mainstream” exposure and not even much airplay on Spanish-language radio stations, which are geared more toward salsa and tejano styles than Mana’s reggae-inflected alternative rock.

But members of the band and officials at their record label see those figures as an insult.

“That’s a mistake,” says drummer and songwriter Alex Gonzalez. “That’s a big mistake. There are a lot of small stores in L.A. especially that sell a lot of our records but aren’t hooked up to SoundScan.”

In fact, some in the band’s camp are claiming that the first-week SoundScan figure could be as little as 10% of the real sales for the album.

“Based on our calculations and the reorders [from stores], we have it at 178,000,” says Michael Galbe, senior marketing manager for Warner Music Latin America.

If that figure is true, “Suen~os Liquidos” would have topped LeAnn Rimes’ “You Light Up My Life: Inspirational Songs” as the No. 1 album in the country that week.

That’s absurd, says Mike Shalett, chief operating officer of SoundScan--though he agrees that a good share of the rock en espan~ol retail market is not covered by his service.

“We don’t cover bodegas [neighborhood shops] or grocery stores where a lot of these records are sold,” he says. “And we don’t cover swap meets where a lot are sold as well. So it’s true, there are traditional outlets that sell Latin product that aren’t counted.”

But, he says, the discrepancy is not close to that claimed by Mana, and the gap has even narrowed considerably since the band released its last two albums, especially with a greater SoundScan reach in Puerto Rico, one of the band’s top U.S. markets.

Those previous releases are also the subject of dispute for Mana; in each case, SoundScan’s figures are about 30% of those claimed by the record company. For 1994’s “Donde Jugaran Los Nin~os,” SoundScan reports total sales of 233,000 to date as opposed to the record company’s 700,000. For 1995’s “Cuando Los Angeles Lloran,” the difference is 125,000 versus 400,000.

If the 30% formula is even close to accurate, that would still put the new album’s first-week sales at more than 50,000 (which would have placed it at No. 21 in the nation that week) and about 125,000 in five weeks.

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NUMBERS GAME: Why does the rock en espan~ol crowd even care what SoundScan says? Gonzalez says that the band is paid royalties based on actual sales, not SoundScan numbers, and that payments match with the higher figures quoted by the record company.

Tomas Cookman, who manages the rock en espan~ol band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, also says that payments for its new album, “Fabulosos Calavera,” reflect sales of more than 80,000 copies in less than two months rather than the 5,000 reported by SoundScan.

But SoundScan numbers have become the official tally of the music industry. And doing well on SoundScan has come to mean validation for an act--or a genre. Doing well there draws the attention of concert promoters, radio programmers and journalists, which could lead to more exposure in the mainstream.

SoundScan has proved a seal of approval for several musical realms. The firm’s advent in 1990 helped boost both country music and hip-hop as national forces by showing the true strength of the genres’ audiences. The addition of Christian-oriented stores to the tally four years ago helped give a mainstream presence to such acts as DC Talk and the “God’s Property” gospel project by placing them squarely in the Top 10.

“We’re just trying to get more people educated about this music,” Cookman says. “We don’t want it just stuck in the Latin musical ghetto.”--S.H.

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