The legendary British Australian rock band AC/DC is one of the few holdouts when it comes to selling music through the iTunes record store, a stand the group has taken in part because it refuses to sell individual songs as singles — “We don’t make singles, we make albums,” says guitarist Angus Young — and Apple won’t let the band restrict its iTunes sales to just albums. That’s why its new album, Black Ice, is exclusively being sold through Wal-Mart stores, and it may also have something to do with the fact that the record has been topping the BitTorrent download charts as well.

According to TorrentFreak, just five days after the album was leaked on BitTorrent it had already been downloaded 400,000 times. Download-tracking firm Big Champagne said that in the first week it was available (the leak occurred on October 7, and the official release was on October 20) it was being downloaded about 100,000 times a day. If that rate continued — and there’s no reason to think that it hasn’t — then the album was downloaded more than a million times before it went on sale.

Has that affected physical sales of the record? There are only a couple of days worth of statistics to go on, and those are estimates, but it doesn’t appear to have hurt CD sales through Wal-Mart. According to Billboard magazine, sources said that close to 200,000 copies of Black Ice sold on the first day alone, and music-industry tip sheet Hits Daily Double said that based on first and second-day sales, the album could sell as many as 800,000 copies in its first week. That would make the record the biggest seller for record label Sony BMG in more than two years.

Demand for AC/DC’s music no doubt has something to do with the fact that the band — which has sold more albums than anyone but The Beatles — hasn’t released a new record in about eight years. But it’s interesting to see that almost a million illegal downloads of Black Ice doesn’t seem to have hampered sales of the physical product at all.

A New Music Express piece on Radiohead brings with it a rather large knee to the goolies for comScore, which came out with some numbers on downloads of the band’s “pay what you want” album In Rainbows (I wrote about comScore’s results here). ComScore said that its survey showed less than 40 per cent paid for the album, and most paid less than $4. There was quite a bit of skepticism about the results, however, since — as Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses.com pointed out — it was based on just a few hundred people. Well, here’s what the band said in a 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.”

comScore has since defended its analysis, according to this MTV story, and there is a statement on comScore’s blog with more detail about the company’s methodology. For anyone who is interested, Canadian musician Jane Siberry has been allowing fans to pay whatever they want for her music for several years now, and keeps a running tally of how many paid and the average price in the sidebar of her online store. More than 90 per cent pay the “recommended” price or higher, and the average price is well above what a song sells for on iTunes.

Baseball fan Allan Wood, who downloaded dozens of major-league games through the Major League Baseball service and paid good money for them (close to $300), wrote a post yesterday that got a lot of attention in both the blogosphere and traditional media: it seems his files suddenly stopped working, because MLB had changed the kind of digital-rights management it used and failed to tell anyone. Not only that, but they refused to provide any refunds or allow him to download the games again.

Wood has blogged about this problem before, but for whatever reason (because it got picked up by Techmeme.com perhaps? Or BoingBoing?) it got more attention this time — and MLB apparently heard about the rising storm of negative publicity somehow. An update to Wood’s blog says that he got a call from a representative for the league, who admitted that they had handled things badly, and said that everyone affected would be able to download their games again for free. Staci at PaidContent also talked to someone at MLB about it.

Score: Baseball – 0; Blogosphere – 1.

Michael Geist has a post about the results of a recent Canadian government survey of downloading and its effect on music sales, and the study (full text of which is here) came to two conclusions: one was that, in the case of those who download music, there was a slight positive effect on their purchases of CDs — in other words, they bought more than the average.

The broader conclusion of the study, which was commissioned by Industry Canada and done by two researchers from the University of London, was that when looking at the entire Canadian population, downloading (which is, after all, still a fringe activity) has no perceptible effect on music sales whatsoever. Michael has the money quote:

“The analysis of the entire Canadian population does not uncover either a positive or negative relationship between the number of files downloaded from P2P networks and CDs purchased.

That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.”

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone (except perhaps those who believe the PR campaign waged by the record industry). As far back as 2004 there was a study by the wonderfully-named Felix Oberholzer and Koleman Strumpf, which found that the impact made by downloading on music sales was “not statistically distinguishable from zero.”

Ever wondered why digital music – the legal kind, that is – costs so much? After all, at 99 cents a song, you wind up paying the same amount for all the songs on a compact disc as if you had bought the CD in a regular store. You might have blamed iTunes for that, since it was the first to make a big splash in the market, and is now the undisputed leader. But Apple CEO Steve Jobs has actually been doing his best to keep prices low, since the the major record labels (there used to be five but now there are only four) want to crank them up. That position seems to have set off some alarm bells in anti-trust circles, since it smacks of collusion.

Crusading New York attorney and gubernatorial candidate Eliot Spitzer started looking into the practice late last year, and now the U.S. Department of Justice has said it is investigating too. “The Antitrust Division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry,” Justice Department spokeswoman Gina Talamona said, without providing any further details. Several of the major labels have already reportedly received subpoenas.

This isn’t the first time the major record labels have been investigated for collusion or price-fixing. The Federal Trade Commission looked into similar allegations involving old-fashioned CD sales, and the case was eventually settled with a financial payment from the record companies. According to the complaint, the labels kept prices high by preventing Wal-Mart and other retailers from lowering prices, and by doing so they overcharged music buyers by almost $500-million (U.S.). As part of the settlement, the labels paid $67-million in cash and gave $76-million worth of CDs to the states that filed suit for use in schools and libraries.