Before you dive into this week's Billboard sales chart based on SoundScan sales numbers, keep in mind that it was likely released without information from retail giant Best Buy. Yesterday (9/26), SoundScan alerted all paid subscribers via email that the numbers for the week may be inaccurate and that they will "extrapolate" for the missing sales data. The company also warned clients to be "advised that there may be anomalies in the data for the week ending 9/24/06."

SoundScan did not indicate what retail information was missing, but two record companies indicated to FMQB that data seems to show Best Buy's sales data was not included. SoundScan would not confirm this with either company.

Late on Wednesday (9/27), SoundScan issued a statement to its clients stating, "To the extent that the census data from the data supplier in the chain strata which was unable to report becomes available, we currently estimate that Nielsen SoundScan will be reprocessed to reflect the actual point-of-sale data after 6pm ET, Friday 9/29/06."

One company explained the missing data to its staff like this: "Soundscan weighted the other retailers in each market to estimate market sales for the week. Don't 'add in' additional sales. There will be aberrations based on some titles that Best Buy may do better with but the totals have been supplemented already. SoundScan will repost everything if Best Buy can get their data in a timely fashion. Since Best Buy ran sales on most of the new titles, debuts could be smaller than actual size."

In a press release, Megaforce Records questioned why it is paying $26,000 a year to receive sales numbers from SoundScan, stating: "Shouldn't it be SoundScan's job to report the actual sales numbers, not a guessing game?"  Megaforce is concerned over a debut by Mushroomhead on the SoundScan chart that shows only 12,183 units sold when another sales tracking company had them selling closer to 26,000.