Idolator

Hey, remember those sales figures cobbled together by marketing firm ComScore that suggested a majority of Radiohead fans and Internet rubberneckers didn't feel like paying the band to download In Rainbows? Well, many people, including the band, are calling bullshit now. But ComScore is standing by its math, dammit.

Warner Bros Records senior technology director Ethan Kaplan quickly savaged comScore's methodology, which included only a "few hundred" in the study. Yesterday, Radiohead issued their own statement calling the figures "purely speculative": "As the album could only be downloaded from the band's website, it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales. The figures quoted by the company comScore Inc are wholly inaccurate and in no way reflect definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project."

Then last night comScore marketing manager and analyst Andrew Lipsman posted a lengthy blog entry in defence, stating the agency uses "a representative sample of two million internet users", which he said this time was "nearly one thousand" (though that later became "hundreds"): "When we observe an e-commerce transaction in our panel, the value we observe represents the actual price paid by that consumer ... If we didn't have a reasonable sample from which to extrapolate, we wouldn't have released the data. But we did, and we're confident in what the data showed."

Well, there's that rainbow-colored grain of salt we were talking about: Only a few hundred people polled out of the apparently 1.2 million people who "visited" (with or without downloading) the In Rainbows site, to use ComScore's own initial estimate. Will we ever know how much paper Thom and friends stacked up thanks to its greatest media coupmost altruistic gesture? Or would hard numbers spoil the sense of do-gooderism?

ComScore Vs Radiohead: Are Download Stats A Creep, A Weirdo? [paidContent UK]