What with video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band becoming higher-profile vehicles for rock bands to hawk their wares than old-fashioned music-centric venues like radio, the effects of the games’ song choices are of keen interest to music-industry observers. So last week Ars Technica did up a graph showing that certain songs featured in Guitar Hero 3–including Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” and the Strokes’ “Reptilia”–saw large sales jumps, percentage-wise, after the game hit store shelves. Quoth Ars: “The week GH III was released, ‘Reptilia’ sold 127 percent more digital copies than it had the week before. The following week saw another 96 percent jump in sales. That number stayed high the next week as well, as the song saw a modest 3 precent [sic] increase.” All well and good, but it’s hard to figure out just what, exactly, these sales increases actually mean, given that the numbers Ars threw around were percentages and not hard totals. That 127% gain for “Reptilia” would have meant a lot more if it had sold, say, 3,500 copies in the pre-GH week than, say, 1,000 or so. Ars’ graph after the jump.

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