Last week, we were skeptical of a Bloomberg story about a Forrester Research report claiming that iTunes sales had tanked 65%. It looks like The Browser was sniffing the right tree. From the New York Post last Friday, the author of the Forrester report says Bloomberg got it wrong:

On his blog, [Forrester Research analyst Josh] Bernoff defended his "simple little report" by saying certain media outlets highlighted only one of his findings - that sales were plummeting.

"Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number of transactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion . . . as we pointed out in the report," he wrote.

Basically, what Bernoff is saying here is that his numbers suggest that the number of iTunes transactions -- that means purchases, not individual tracks -- was levelling off, indicating that there were simply fewer customers, not fewer tracks sold. Or as he put it in the original report, "Few iPod Owners Are Big iTunes Buyers". He did not make a statement about iTunes' overall sales. Those who did estimate overall iTunes sales figures, as the Post story notes, found good news for Apple. comScore estimates iTunes sales revenue is up 84% through the first nine months of 2006. Nielsen says all digital music sales of individual tracks are up 67% through November. Meanwhile, on his blog, Bernoff has a bit more to say and some scary anecdotes about how fast a bit of bad news travels.