

Thom Yorke's representative told me that the band have "decided not to give out any figures" for sales of Radiohead's In Rainbows album, but that isn't stopping people from making their best guesses based on what little information is available.

The Seminal estimates that Radiohead sold about $10 million-worth of albums as of 10/12, assuming Gigwise was correct that approximately 1.2 million people downloaded the album from the site and that the average price paid per album was $8. We heard that figure too, but also heard that a later, more accurate average was $5, which would lower the figure to $6 million.

But Gigwise's anonymous source may not have meant that all 1.2 million people who downloaded the album in the first three days Radiohead's site paid for it. ComScore said 60 percent of downloaders didn't pay, which could bring that revenue figure down to $2.4 million.

A Radioheadrepresentative said ComScore's percentage was inaccurate, so Radiohead's exact sales numbers remain shrouded in secrecy. However, an inside source tells us that details could be released as the band gears up for its next tour.

Meanwhile, Forbes and BigChampagne revealed that on the first day the album was available, 240K people downloaded it for free over BitTorrent, and that over the following days an average of 100K people per day did the same, for a total of over 500K BitTorrent downloads over the initial week of its release. It appears that even though the album was available for free on InRainbows.com, plenty of people preferred to use BitTorrent rather than Radiohead's site, which required an email registration (although some of those BitTorrent downloads may have been the result of slowdowns on the ordering site).

(image from sometimesinthefall)