The president-elect who claims his relatively narrow electoral-college victory was a "landslide" strayed into the music news sphere on Wednesday by declaring that JACKIE EVANCHO's album sales "skyrocketed" after she agreed to perform at his inauguration. As presidential fudges and exaggerations go, this one doesn't particularly matter, but a) all presidential fudges and exaggerations do matter, and b) this is a music space and he has invited himself in. Per the fact-checkers at BILLBOARD, the 16-year-old classical crossover singer's "SOMEDAY AT CHRISTMAS" did enjoy a healthy bump in sales for the week ending Dec. 22, the week the inaugural performance was announced. But so did pretty much every album in the Billboard universe, holiday albums especially. Plus, she had a featured TV performance that week on "AMERICA'S GOT TALENT." She sold 5,000 more albums than she did the week before, for multiple reasons. A week later, her sales and chart position both slipped. None of her other albums returned to the BILLBOARD 200, and "SOMEDAY AT CHRISTMAS" remains her worst-performing album on that chart. None of this is meant as a knock on Evancho, a talented vocalist who has earned as strong a following as a teen classical singer can expect to have in 2017, and who moved a lot of units in December. But if you want to know what skyrocketing means, here's Billboard on GEORGE MICHAEL album sales. As SPIN pointed out, Trump borrowed the skyrocketing language from BREITBART, which based its Dec. 26 story on a Dec. 25 TMZ report that used Trump-like "we're told" sourcing while wildly misreporting Evancho's numbers. If no one on PEOTUS' staff knows where to find a better source, I'd be happy to help them out. Because the truth will always serve him better, and it will serve us better, too... If, on the other hand, the prez-elect is trying to subtly argue that NIELSEN SOUNDSCAN is underreporting figures in certain sectors, I would happily attend that press conference... MTV NEWS' DOREEN ST. FÉLIX has a smart essay on Evancho, GIACOMO PUCCINI, appropriation and the deeper meanings of Trump's music programming... A big internet search company you may have heard of wants to buy a big audio platform you may have heard of, according to a rumor that appears to have started here. The rumor spread quickly, and before long you could read here that it came from "multiple sources," even though those "sources" were little more than infinite repeats of a single rumor. Pro tip: If you "can't measure the accuracy of each of the stories that we're hearing," try not reporting them. As I am hereby not doing... Actual music biz acquisitions: BLACKSTONE buys SESAC. NARAS buys $13.5 million MANHATTAN mansion (and will bring the GRAMMYS to NEW YORK in 2018, according to the NY POST).