taken, I'm given to believe, from a recent issue of Rolling Stone:

For one, the band’s management attacked a widely cited report by comScore claiming that 62 percent of people who downloaded In Rainbows didn’t pay a cent. “In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press regarding the number of downloads and the price paid for the album, the group’s representatives would like to remind people that, 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 statement reads, adding that the band “confirm that 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.”

this can't be anything less than a success since they essentially made a lot of money off a leaked album. it'll be interesting to see where the album charts when it's released on CD

Yeah, I read that statement somewhere, and while I can't vouch for the comScore numbers with any certainty, this:

In reply to:

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as the album could only be downloaded from the band’s website, it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales

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is a little bullshit. The idea, if I recall, is that comScore monitors something like 2 million web users worldwide (with their permission), and thus used their data on these users to extrapolate sales and traffic numbers for the world.

There's obviously going to be a margin of error, but it's far from "impossible" to use statistics to give people a good idea of what happened.

That's genious and you're stupid.