

Radiohead's "Nude" made the Billboard Hot 100 this week at no. 37 – their first appearance on the chart since "High & Dry" in 1996. I had been wondering why Radiohead picked iTunes to release the remix stems, rather than using their own website as they had with other aspects of In Rainbows' digital release. Richard Bradley thinks he knows the answer.

"In a nutshell, [Radiohead] kind of scammed people into buying the single five times over." His theory is that iTunes' sales numbers for "Nude" were misleading because Apple included sales of the song as well as the individual stems for guitar, drums, bass, voice and strings/effects in the same sales figure.

Update: Bradley's theory has been confirmed.

Bradley attributes the song's appearance on the Billboard chart to how well it had been selling in iTunes (the biggest music retailer in the country), claiming Radiohead did all of this on purpose.

However, "Nude" did not chart in iTunes, as we originally understood him to have claimed. "Under '[Radiohead's] Top Songs,'" he wrote, "iTunes shows the five most popular [Radiohead] downloads, and asyou might have guessed it looks like a goddamn nudist colony."

Bradley's theory that Radiohead's "Nude" was helped up the charts bysales of its individual components could hold water, but I disagreethat the band intentionallyreleased the stems through iTunes in order to scam people andartificially inflate sales numbers. Besides, who's to say that sales ofthe individual elements of a track shouldn't count towards sales of themixed-together track?

I've contacted Apple to try to find out whether the iTunes store hadbeen counting sales of the "Nude" stems towards its sales figures for"Nude." Knowing the answer would go a long way towardsclearing this up.

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(As an aside, my admittedly dodgy theory about Radiohead's use of the iTunes storefor the "Nude" stems was that the band was scrambling to deploy a morepermissive remix policy due to a little Smackdown

we put together, and that it was easier to release them through iTunesthan setting up the commerce on their own website. The remixing sectionin that poll had the mostlopsided results of any of the rounds – currently 7561 votes for TrentReznor, 695 votes for Radiohead.)

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