Admit it: when Apple announced that the iTunes Music Store had sold five times as many songs as Napster did during that embattled brand's first week back from the wasteland of bankruptcy, you did a little jig. Not a foxtrot, not a two-step, but an actual jig. You were clicking your heels together and everything. Well, hold the phone, there, Mabel-- looks like Apple's "We Outsold Napster 5 to 1, We Are So Smart, S-M-R-T" press release might have been a little misleading, if not downright wrong, and new information about where Apple gets its numbers may well force us to reassess our entire perspective on the iTMS's alleged market-leading position. (Sheesh, next you'll be telling us there's no Santa Claus.)

See, according to TechNewsWorld, Napster bigwig Chris Gorog isn't denying that his new service sold 300,000 songs in its first week (since that number comes straight from Napster's own PR lackeys), but he voices a little distrust in Apple's claim that the iTMS sold 1.5 million in the same period. Citing the same Nielsen SoundScan numbers that Apple quoted, Gorog points out that the figures only account for "827,000 single downloads" from all services total, so he "does not know where Apple got the 1.5 million figure." He's got a point. SoundScan's figures should have covered the previous Monday-through-Sunday period, which overlapped Napster's first week by five of its seven days-- so unless Apple sold most of those 1.5 million songs in the last forty-eight hours of the week, well, clearly someone's numbers are goofy.

But if there is goofiness, it's almost certainly at SoundScan. Get this: referring to Apple's "over 80 percent of the market" claims, Gorog notes that "those numbers did not include Napster's results" because Napster "hadn't reported them yet"; add in Napster's numbers and Apple's "80 percent market share is reduced to 62 percent." Well, okay, you think-- 62 percent is still nothing to sneeze at. True. Except that Napster isn't the only non-iTMS download service that SoundScan left out of the equation: in a Reuters article, a SoundScan spokesperson admits that the weekly report has so far omitted Napster sales, but also reveals that it "doesn't yet include songs sold from MusicMatch or BuyMusic," either. As such, its figures "did not represent the entire, currently available market for legally purchased digital music."

Geez, no duh. A lack of Napster results is understandable, given certain pesky laws of time, space, and dimension. But no BuyMusic or MusicMatch either? Who else is there? This is troubling, because Apple's "over 80 percent" market share suddenly takes on a far darker tone when you consider that SoundScan's results apparently only include songs sold by Apple and Akbar 'n' Jeff's Downloadable Music Hut. So maybe you should tone that jig down a notch or two. Or at least stop grinning like a maniac while you do it.