Extrapolating Your Extrapolations for Humorous Effect

There's plenty to be embarrassed about in Ars Technica's reporting of how Guitar Hero 3 sells music.

Perhaps the easiest thing to be embarrassed about (depending on how you happened on the story) is that a story on digital music traffic, the effect thereon of videogames, was covered on music-in-popcult blog Idolator, while their sister all-about-videogames blog Kotaku apparently missed the boat entirely*.

Also embarrassing is the seemingly rushed, fawning, isn't-technology-wonderful extrapolations from the figures**. Three of the bands supposedly reaping the most reward from the "Guitar Hero Effect" actually see marked growth in paid downloads for week of release, but then a drop in that (admittedly, still high) growth once the game has really had time to reach consumers.

It's safe to presume that the spike in downloads is the result of early adopters. The spike occurs on the week that ends on the day GH3 is released, meaning one of two things motivated those downloads: either

- GH3-heads are spending the week pre-emptively downloading everything they can from the final, final final, easter-eggs-and-all setlist; or
- Dorks who call themselves "hardcore" without a hint of irony are playing through the game on release day and downloading songs they like and/or hear as soon as they find them.

Now, these are both nice things to happen. It's always nice when people discover new music to like. But is it really changing the face of music if a few nerds realise that the Beastie Boys are kind of like MC Lars and thus worthy of a spin?

Embarrassing in a more business-as-usual kind of way is the attempts at legitimising this quickly-coined phenom: "a source close inside the music industry" is commenting on our data? Oh my, I bet it's Rick Rubin! And what does this source say?

"As long as your song ships with the game and you offer the track to be downloaded digitally, you see an increase.

"You don't say, dingus! Who'd have thought that making your track available for download would result in an increase in downloads?

Finally embarrassing is the clearest extrapolation from this confusing, half-story of a graph, which is that clearly, no Ars Technica staff were frequenting hipster bars during the big definitive-articles-are-the-saviours-of-rock boom of a couple of years back, which is hardly surprising. Look what they've done! With a simple de-pluralising, they've gone and made Julian Casablanca(s)' band name go and look dirty!

* Kotaku tend to operate on a siege-mentality us-against-the-world position common to geeks, so the easiest reasoning is that the story was passed over - despite Gawker blogs linking to each other whenever possible - on account of it didn't involve nerd-rage righteous indignation, naked non-actual women, or name-dropping re: the Kotaku staff saying nerdlinger stuff to awkward VG execs.
** To combat which, I am about to provide some rushed, ill-informed, isn't-technology-a-bubble counter-extrapolations.