Radiohead, comScore Spar Over "In Rainbows" Metrics

It wasn't that long ago that art rockers Radiohead gave the record industry's business model the boot by releasing its album "In Rainbows"
online and at a variable price.Now that the dust has settled over the revolutionary move, the band is taking issue with a report released by comScore showing that 62% of fans chose to pay nothing for the album.
From the band's released statement:

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… it is impossible for outside organisations to have accurate figures on sales.

However, they can 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.

Meanwhile, Andrew Lipsman, senior analyst at comScore, defended the company's findings on the company blog:

For the Radiohead study, we observed the activity of nearly one thousand people who visited the "In Rainbows" site, a significant percentage of whom downloaded the album. We ultimately observed several hundred paid transactions, all of which ranged between $0-$20, representing a very robust sample for estimating the average price paid per transaction. It's true that any sample has natural variability, so these numbers are, in fact, estimates. However, when you have a relatively large sample falling within a narrow range of values (i.e.
there's a small standard deviation), the margin of error in the estimate is minimized.

It's definitely in Radiohead's interest to denounce comScore's numbers if they're incorrect. However, issuing a blanket statement and not backing it up with a rival set of metrics seems sketchy. Until the band is able to produce a definitive set of numbers this issue can hardly be settled. But with Trent Reznor's recent attempt at adopting the same business model, we should be provided with another example in the wild soon enough.

Photo courtesy of Chelseapies.tv.