Evan Martin ([info]evan) wrote,
@ 2008-03-02 19:19:00
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new nine inch nails album
New Nine Inch Nails album, all instrumental, released online for $5 with CDs to follow. The actual download site is toast. But they also put the first quarter of it up for free on bittorrent. So far I'm reminded of the instrumental interludes from his other albums, with a bit more drone to it. First two tracks are mostly piano.

Their take on the distribution method is interesting, too: they have five different purchase options ranging from free to $300. The $5 one gets you the full album digitally. Each level beyond that on the price scale buys you more physical goods: first CDs (so antiquated!) and a book, then multiple formats of the audio, all the way up to personally autographed LPs. "When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied." It appears the entire album (?) is CC licensed, too.

This is the note included with the album. I love its straightforward honesty.
This torrent is an official upload from Nine Inch Nails.

We're very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV.  Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc.  It's licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

We've also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album.  If you'd like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf

Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV.  Undoubtedly you'll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you're interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5.  You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.

We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music.  Thanks for listening.


http://ghosts.nin.com

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[info]erik
2008-03-03 04:02 am UTC (link)
I wonder if there are psych/sociology studies on economic altruism, i.e. how a person might react differently given two approaches: 1) "Look, we know you could download this album for free, but we're offering it cheap, and would really appreciate your support!", and 2) "If you download this album for free, we will fuck you until you bleed."

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[info]xaosenkosmos
2008-03-03 04:24 am UTC (link)
Radiohead's latest album showed that many people place absolutely no value on music. I'm sure the band generated a lot of goodwill, but they might not gain any "extra" money from the people who'd otherwise casually copy. Hopefully the goodwill gets more people into their concerts, which will at least increase their bottom line some. Otherwise, the model looks less attractive financially, which precludes it as a "game-changer."

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[info]erik
2008-03-03 04:32 am UTC (link)
True, and you make a point that I've been making for a long time, which is, even if pirating wasn't possible, there are a whole subset of people who're so lazy and cheap that even if they couldn't pirate a movie/CD/whatever, they wouldn't go out and buy it anyway. The RIAA/MPAA is obsessed with the notion that if they could just stop pirating, all of these people would be FORCED to buy their product, not realizing that most of them would probably just shrug and move on, and the difference in revenue would be negligible.

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[info]eqe
2008-03-03 05:30 am UTC (link)
Hmm, I heard about the initial release but didn't see any followups. Link to a postmortem on Radiohead?

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[info]xaosenkosmos
2008-03-03 08:25 am UTC (link)
Nothing too recent, which is disappointing. This Times Online piece about In Rainbows (10/11/2007) shows ~30% freebie rate. The link below shows about 5$/copy guesstimates a week later.

It's good for Radiohead, since they've got both the capital to record and the recognition to get money in. Not so sure about other people, though =\

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[info]chris
2008-03-03 09:10 am UTC (link)
in an interview with Thom Yorke, he said that they had made more *online sales* revenue off of In Rainbows than every other release of theirs combined, with the caveat that because online rights are treated differently, they made very little money on previous releases due to how their recording contracts were setup.

so it might not be much or it might be a lot, but as a band, it's a win because they weren't getting anything out of the deal before.

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[info]beckiexyceh
2008-07-16 01:15 am UTC (link)
To see any of this as mildly authoritarian is fine, but to link it to "out-of-control executive power" is just howlingly ignorant.

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[info]eqe
2008-07-16 02:26 am UTC (link)
(huh, whatup with the reply from beck****h above this one? Doesn't seem to be remotely related to the thread, no obvious spam content, account appears to be new and content-free...

oh nevermind, the journal is a spam linkfarm, looking for mojo. *flag*.)

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[info]gimpyprophet
2008-03-03 05:33 am UTC (link)
If you trust this article from Wired at all, they've made a LOT ( $6-10 million )of money off of the new album. I'd really love to see hard numbers, but apparently they're not giving them out.

Either way, this move is absolutely fantastic. I especially love the FLAC option since that's exactly what I do with all my albums when I buy them. It's pretty much made me not buy any mp3's online, so I hope more groups follow suit as I'll be buying/downloading it immediately.

Also, I've been craving an instrumental album from NiN since I first heard them. Fantastic.

Edited at 2008-03-03 05:34 am UTC

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[info]bostonsteamer
2008-03-03 06:20 pm UTC (link)
Definitely! Check out the book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion. One of the main points is that if you give something away, you are looked upon more favorably.

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[info]jwz
2008-03-03 06:29 am UTC (link)
I managed to get through to the official download site eventually (still downloading the zip). After the first few failures, I looked for it on both Amazon and Pirate Bay and didn't find it, but Metafilter has the links to those.

Also cool to see that he's seeded torrents of DVD-quality versions of Closure and Broken (the former was only released on VHS, and the latter was unobtainium).

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[info]evan
2008-03-03 04:20 pm UTC (link)
I happily set off to go download these, then realized I can't think of circumstances where I'd want to watch Broken again. (I think my most recent viewing of that was in college and by pure coincidence a girl was over who a year or two later via different friends ended up becoming BFFs with my now-girlfriend; I hope she (the one who saw it) has no recollection of it or at least association of it with me.)

On the other hand, I'm all over these Closure DVDs.

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[info]krisztinajavez
2008-06-29 11:57 pm UTC (link)
+1

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