[cferneyh]

Another thing that must be figured into the calculations (even though it is folly to estimate album sales from such abstract evidence) is that many households own more than 1 album. Every one of our households probably owns 10 albums. That 1.8 million is a bare minimum hypothetical one-album-per-householdfigure, because we know that the first three albums have surpassed the one million mark...the last four albums have sold half a mil or less, meaning in an incredibly loose estimation, most likely they have sold 6-9 million albums.

Yeah, but when they calculated the "1 in 6" figure, I can virtually guarantee that what they did was took the total amount of albums sold and divided it by the number of households in Canada. It's the only way they could have come up with the figure short of conducting a survey with a random sample of Canadians and finding the true incidence of Hip CD ownership, and I can virtually guarantee that they didn't do that.

Here's another way to look at it. Say out of 100 random Canadian adults 5 of them own at least one Hip CD, and 95 don't. Of those 5 people, let's say two of them own 10, two of them own five, and the last one owns three. That's a total of 33 Hip CDs owned by a random sample of 100 Canadian adults, which you could then take and say "per capita, 33% of Canadian adults own a Hip CD" when the true incidence is actually only 5%.

Anyway, I'm probably only confusing everyone but the point that I'd trying to make is that as of when that article was written, 1.8 million CDs sold is actually a lot closer to the truth than 5+ million (in Canada at least).

BTW, I work in stats which is why I'm so anal about these calculations and how I have a pretty good idea of how CNN came up with their "1 in 6" figure. :oops: :thumb: