I dreamed a dream of transparency gone by.

So the Simon Cowell-adored Susan Boyle’s I Dreamed A Dream—which comes out here next Monday—has apparently set another Amazon record, this time for “Amazon’s largest global CD pre-order EVER.” I got a press release about this bit of puffery this AM.

Now, I am happy for Ms. Boyle’s success and think that her record will probably wind up at No. 1 after next week’s GaGa-Lambert-Rihanna-Susan free-for-all. But I’m generally skeptical of any claims about Amazon sales having any meaning at all; the numbers are relatively small (this week’s No. 1 on the Internet chart, Andrea Bocelli’s Christmas album, sold 17,000 copies via online CD retailers and 136,000 copies overall) and the records that sell well via that site are generally ones that appeal to older consumers. (I did some number-crunching to figure out just how much these statistic-free chart stats could mean here.) So I decided to write back to the publicist who sent me the release with a question that I think is important, even if no reporter has bothered to ask it!

Thanks for this. Are there hard numbers to supplement this
announcement? It would be nice to know just how many copies sold
constitutes the breaking of a record.

I have not heard back yet, sadly. But I guess I’ll find out what those numbers really mean when the SoundScan reports come in 13 days from now!