Calling New York

I would like to return, if I may, to my very first article for this website written somewhere around 12 months ago. It was entitled Elvis - the great record sales debate. In that article I expressed confidence that evidence to substantiate the long standing claim that Elvis Presley had sold over-well over-one billion copies of his discs did indeed exist. It was just that it was hard to easily locate. I did not realise just how hard.

In January 2005 at the ceremony held on the lawn of Graceland to mark the gold disc award given by the Recording Association of America (RIAA) to 'Good Rocking Tonight' Sony/BMG/RCA issued what seemed to me, at least, to be a bullish statement saying that we could expect many more such awards to emerge during the year. Naturally many fans assumed that as in the past these awards would be presented at the next anniversary of Elvis' passing, or if not, then on the anniversary of his birthday. Indeed in a burst of optimism I inferred from this press release that at long last some of the missing sales had been located and that closure on the contentious issue of who had sold the most records in history was about to be achieved. But apart from an insignificant upgrade of the status of his recent albums last January absolutely nothing has happened and no explanation has been offered despite several fans writing to Sony/BMG/RCA and asking for one.

This whole subject is given added pique by the recent estimate from the International Federation of Phonographic Industries as published in the March edition of the esteemed magazine the Record Collector. They have estimated Elvis' sales as being a mere 300 million albums well behind the Beatles not to mention Michael Jackson and only just ahead of Cliff Richard. The furious reaction of fans to this ludicrous under assessment will not stop many people from accepting it at face value and querying whether we fans have the right to call Elvis the "King".

So what are the problems Sony/BMG/RCA (hereinafter referred to as just BMG) face in their efforts-or lack of them - in trying to achieve closure on this subject? In this article I will try and list them and suggest a way out of this impasse. Some of what I say is guesswork but not that much.

(1) Firstly we are not talking here about sales returns but shipping invoices. RIAA rules mean that in order to qualify for an award they require written evidence that the pressing plants have dispatched the necessary number of units to the retailers but that's not all...

(2) The RIAA also need to see the evidence depicting the units i.e. copies of discs returned by the retailer as unsold.

(3) The sheets for (1) and (2) were sent for storage to the BMG storage depot in New York and have been stacking up there since November 1955. I would hazard a guess that (1) and (2) were not attached to one another, making it harder to assemble the complete picture and thus arrive at a NET sales figure for any particular record.

(4) All this material is contained in literally thousands upon thousands of boxes stretching back over a 50 year period. And you can bet that both the shipping invoices and the returns cover all BMG's many artists on the same sheets. Therefore the researcher probably has to separate out the Elvis figures from the rest making the task even more time consuming.

(5) BMG must have tabulated the net sales figures as and when the sheets came to hand, and before they were put in boxes , or they would not have been able to establish the song writing and publishing royalties- never mind Elvis' cut which was based on a % of sales. I suspect that the format in which the net sales were tabulated was either considered unusable in its truncated form by the RIAA auditors, or more likely disposed of by the record company after a number of years, i.e. at the point BMG felt they were safe from any retrospective legal actions or auditing checks.

(6) Much mention was made of the Colonel's files being in better order than BMG's, but again I suspect that they would have been drawn from sheets recording net sales figures and not the raw material wanted by the RIAA auditors. I say this because I do not think that the Colonel would have been given any sheets which contained the returns on other artists. Some writers have suggested that the Colonel felt BMG were sitting on royalties due to Elvis and this may be because he could never be sure that he was being given the full picture-but he probably was. I just don't believe that BMG would have dared try to put one over on the Colonel.

(7) I can see that any comprehensive research programme will be labour intensive and thus expensive. The cost would have to come out of somebody's current budget-and I do not see any head of department sticking their hands up to volunteer for that!

(8) One assumes that over the years the boxes have been placed in storage in some sort of chronological order. If not then the job becomes truly horrendous. On the face of it I would imagine that the initial sales of a particular record would be easier to find than the incremental sales accumulated over the years and that these would be strewn around in various boxes. Research by other fans suggests this ain't necessarily so - at least in the case of the fifties. However overall I think I must be correct, and there I think may be the nub of the problem. Just consider the case of the 'Something for Everybody' album which barely sold 200,000 copies on release in 1961. Yet it has since earned an RIAA award for sales of over 500,000 with who knows how many uncounted copies still to surface. So that means most of the sales have dribbled in over many many years and it must have been quite a task to find those they did find. Or maybe somebody just got lucky. Remember well placed sources claim that 80% of Presley's sales were accumulated in album form and 66% of these were sold SINCE he died. Actual sales during the fifties only account for between 5 and 10% of the total. It was a much smaller market back then. Not all fans understand this but it is true.

(9) I suspect that the BMG staff could not cope with the sheer amount of shipping invoices in the aftermath of Elvis' death. Given that this period saw his sales literally double then my fear remains that some of the information was never put into storage at all. BMG need to come clean on this.

(10) As informed fans will know BMG had to use outside pressing plants to meet the demand for Elvis albums in the period from August 1977 to the spring of 1978. These plants may well not have sent copies of their shipping documentation to BMG, if the latter were content just to see say monthly updates and end of run totals, whilst having comfort that an audit trail existed, if required. I have to accept that some of these sales may never be tracked down in a form which would be satisfactory to the RIAA auditors.

I think we must therefore appreciate that the task which faces BMG in proving the individual breakdown of Elvis' sales figures to an outside auditor is no easy one... You may well say that given the vast profits made by BMG over so many years they could afford to bear the cost of an exhaustive research exercise. The fact is they won't or at least not without an alternative plan plonked in front of them which cuts the cost and makes it hard in terms of PR to turn down. And this is where Elvis fans could come in ....

.... For I am hoping that a fan, possibly a fan club president living in New York City will read this article and ask his or her local fan club to consider whether it would be feasible to bring together a group of fellow fans-as many as possible - who are willing to give up some of their spare time to assist BMG and through them the RIAA in the task of locating the aforementioned sales evidence held in all those boxes. Such work would be limited to US sales only, not simply because the RIAA would not have a remit for the certification of overseas sales, but in order to ease any concerns BMG might have about the complete global sales of a song appearing in print. Yes I suppose it is conceivable that BMG might be worried that a songwriter or publishing house might submit a claim for unpaid overseas back royalties if such sales were broken down but certainly nobody to my knowledge has done so on the basis of certified US sales to date. We only need to establish US sales-the industry will then accept projections of the global picture. If fans decided this idea had possibilities then they could approach BMG and discuss it with them. As I see it all the latter would have to do is provide a supervisor and possibly give a bit of overtime to a security guard if the exercise takes place outside normal office hours. Fans might be asked to sign on as temporary staff albeit unpaid or at best at a rate the company felt it could afford just to safeguard the company's interests and also sign a letter undertaking not to divulge anything they see-especially to do with other artists. It could be fun - rather like election night when the returns come in. Everybody would- like all volunteers - just do what they could do. As for the record company they might well decline an offer of help, unless it was reasonably well publicised within the Elvis world and received some support from both the Elvis Estate people and the local media playing up the patriotic angle. Americans are very competitive and do not like seeing their side sold short. If such an initiative was launched with due fanfare it just might succeed in getting past some undoubtedly wary record company executives. The costs saved on labour would make the exercise a far less expensive one. There are no doubt plenty of issues which would need to be resolved and I am not saying BMG will even under pressure agree to such a proposal but it might shame them into action. Nothing ventured nothing gained.

So calling New York. Anyone out there willing to pick up the ball and run with it?

There is one initiative BMG can take for themselves without any help. As well as continuing to try and verify Elvis' sales via the RIAA methodology -which as I say won't cover his non USA sales anyway- let the world see what overall global statistics they do have. Such statements as BMG have made over the years suggest that they do know -and it would be mind boggling if they didn't- what his total annual sales were each year. So publish and be damned BMG.

Finally it really is high time that the Fan Club Presidents used their collective muscle to demand that this long running farce about Elvis Presley's record sales is ended. They have the opportunity to do so each August when many of them gather at Graceland. The place is swarming with EPE and BMG executives hobnobbing with one another and running up their expense accounts. So let us see some action boys. In the meantime New York do you hear me?

Nick Ruck Keene

Sources: EPE website, other fans, Ernst Jorgensen, Sony/BMG/RCA., US magazine 'Goldmine'.

- Elvis - The Record Sales Debate
- More articles by Nick Keene

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