YTD MARKETSHARE AT THE SEVEN-MONTH MARK

There’s an apples-and-oranges wrinkle to the year-over-year stats below—not unlike the deflated balls-and-deflated boobs crap we’ve been bombarded with this week. A year ago, RED hadn’t yet fallen under the Columbia umbrella, meaning that the year-over-year comparisons really require an asterisk. Apples-RED—get it? As for Capitol Music Group, SoundScan didn’t start giving the company credit for Capitol Christian until seven months ago, but we’ve been counting Christian as part of CMG’s share since some time in 2013. So in that case, its apples to apples…or oranges to oranges.

Moving along, the 2014 frontrunners—Monte Lipman’s Republic, Rob Stringer’s Columbia and Steve Barnett’s CMG—continue to rule the roost through all the computations, to paraphrase the late, great Lou Reed (at least we think that’s what he said). Meanwhile, John Janick’s rock-steady IGA and Edge and Corson’s surging RCA have the midlevel tier to themselves, although Cameron Strang’s Warner Bros. is coming up on the outside. Moving to Music City, the Nashville majors are in a dogfight as Randy Goodman prepares to duke it out with Mike Dungan.

Additionally, we should point out that wherever two labels showing the same percentage are ranked one above the other, it’s because the label on top actually has a bigger share by a few hundredths of a percentage point. If you’ve got a problem with accuracy, you’re probably on the Donald Trump bandwagon and want to rid America of immigrants and public breast-feeding.