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Ever since Radiohead announced last month that fans could download their new album and pay whatever they wanted for it, music fans and Web analysts have been trying to pin down exactly how many people have downloaded it, and how much they paid.

Last week, Web traffic-measurement firm comScore, Inc. came out with what it said was the first comprehensive study, using statistics from several hundred people who downloaded the album. According to comScore, less than 40 per cent paid for the record, and the average price was $6.

So that's the end of it, right? Not quite. A day after comScore released its report, the band took issue with the company's results.

"In response to purely speculative figures announced in the press," the statement said, "the group's representatives would like to remind people that ... it is impossible for outside organizations to have accurate figures on sales."

The band went on to say 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."

Not to be outdone, comScore posted a statement on its corporate blog on Friday saying it "observed the actual online spending behaviour from a robust sample of hundreds of individuals in order to produce an accurate estimate," and "if we didn't have a reasonable sample from which to extrapolate, we wouldn't have released the data."

In other words, we're still mostly in the dark. Perhaps some day the band will tell all.