I was chatting to Sic this morning and he showed me an interesting graph of some sales stats for CD that he had been keeping.  He was cool for me to post it here as well as his comments:

I've been tracking the chart success of CD ever since the release, comparing the Billboard (US/Best Buy) numbers with the global ones, retrieved from the United World Chart (www.mediatraffic.de). CD has now fallen below the Top 40 of global sales, which means I'm likely unable to follow its future course on a weekly basis. Hence, I figured I'd pass it on to you guys, to provide some perspective on how this thing's turned out. I can't completely vouch that every number is in the exact right place, but I reckon it's close enough. I also took the time to compare the sales to the Geffen/BestBuy deal, minding the 1,3 million copies sold beforehand. Turned out that as I write this, BB is still stuck with 2/3 of their stock. The overall sales are rather good from the labels point of view, as the non-US results pretty much equal the BB buyout. 1,3 Million on both sides, 2,6m in total.

Geffen/Interscope has therefore been raking up profit since Nov 23rd, as the BB presale pretty much nullified Ax's studio bill. Now, they're basically sitting on their asses, watching the non-US sales bringing home the bacon. There's no need to invest in GNR any further at the moment, because they're out for maximum overhead. US in particular is a very dead market as far as their interests are concerned - I mean, the sales are BB's headache until November at least. Why should the label spend money in benefitting them?

Right now, markets outside US are what matters. If Ax decides to hit the road in the summer, that oughta help. If he can tour consistently throughout the summer/fall and drop a new album in November (without BB), he should be able to roll on into the US and get some clout.

But CD ran its course years ago and a merciful release turned out to be the only option.

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