wax&wires

NIN’s Free Album Becomes Best Selling of 2008

Nine Inch Nails licensed Ghosts I-IV under Creative Commons, and released it as a free download from their site in 2008. When it was released, I went directly to the NIN site to download it. It took a while due to bandwidth restrictions on their end, and the sheer number of people flocking to their site to get it. Ghosts I-IV was then released for $5 in the Amazon MP3 store, where it was the top selling album of 2008.

Despite the fact that you could download Ghosts for free, 100% legally, from NIN’s site or any P2P network (since it was released under Creative Commons), people still flocked to purchase the album from an online retailer.

I don’t really see this success being mirrored on a smaller scale, as it takes a known artist to move quantity like that. I’ve had friends’ bands on Noise Trade, which gives albums away or lets you pay what you want. They have seen very little return from it. Since their band is unknown to the listener, the listener will download it for free to give it a go, since the only cost is harddrive space. If it were to cost money though, the listener has a heightened risk in forking out even $5 to download an album they may or may not like.

Do you think the NIN model can be successful with smaller bands? Is it truly a marker for the direction the music industry is heading, or simply the direction that NIN is heading?

You can pick up Ghosts I-IV here, or simply download it from any file sharing network.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm. It is filed under wax and tagged with album, free, nin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.