Why We Hate PR (No. 26,452 In A Series) : Comscore’s Bollocks About Radiohead

So, you must have read about Comscore’s figures suggesting that Radiohead’s new download album didn’t actually do very well in terms of revenues. The whole story smacked of a company inventing a story for attention and every paper and blog just fell for it in a dash to point their fingers at someone’s ‘failure’.

Some PR exec at Comscore (probably Andrew Lipsman) must be busy preparing some charts to show some other execs how many column inches they got by acting like leaches sucking on the noise of some other folks. They just released new figures about UK downloaders – just to keep the story going.

We’re all up for companies promoting their services and letting the world know via press release or badly targeted spam, but why does the media pretend not to notice that they’re busy just republishing made-up stories that PR agencies and their clients crank out as newsworthy. Not enough to write about? Too lazy?

And we’re all up for debate – it would be ok if Radiohead’s previous record label made this attack in some crude way to protect its reputation but the story is just a vicious and snide attack by Comscore to get their services attention. There’s no debate here. Just more PR which makes us despise PR folk and their agencies even more.

And why are we writing this now? Well, because Radiohead (who never told us how many downloads they sold anyway) finally gave a retort to the report and told Comscore to bugger off. MTV reports:

[A] band’s statement also dismissed the results of a recent report issued by comScore, a company that measures online consumer activity. The comScore report suggested that 60 percent of fans who downloaded In Rainbows 8212 which the band offered as a “name-your-own-price” product beginning October 10 8212 paid nothing for the tracks.

In the statement, Radiohead said the comScore data was “wholly inaccurate” and that it “in no way reflected definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.” To date, neither Radiohead nor their U.S. publicist, Steve Martin, have agreed to discuss any of the financial aspects of the download scheme, including how many copies were sold or how much fans paid on average.

Denying that the average non-freeloader fan paid only $6 for the download, as suggested by comScore’s report, the group’s representatives also stressed in the statement that “as the album could only be downloaded from the band’s Web site, it is impossible for outside organizations to have accurate figures on sales.”

ComScore senior analyst Andrew Lipsman strongly defended his company’s results when asked about the band’s claims. “We’re confident in our data,” he said. “There’s a minimal margin of error based on the size of the sample we used and the narrow range of values.”

A British spokesperson for Radiohead also told BBC News that the band’s figures on download sales are “not for public consumption” as “people were still downloading [the album].”

We really hope the figures are different and then maybe the media will spotlight Comscore’s failure. Which we know the media won’t.

www.inrainbows.com