NIN's Music Experiment Sells Big Numbers

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Trent Reznor's new Nine Inch Nails album experiment is a success. Among the various options he gave fans, the most expensive was the $300 Limited Edition Ultra Deluxe Package. It took just over a day for that package to completely sell out, earning Reznor $750,000 in revenue from just that option alone."

Comments

I got it

[Anonymous Coward]

I got the $5 download, it's a really good album, the tracks are strange, but work suprisingly well

Re:I got it

[hsdpa]

[...]the tracks are strange, but work suprisingly well Well, it's NIN, isn't it? I like it. They uploaded the first volume (which can be downloaded from their own site) via some public bittorrent-trackers.

Nice initiative.

Re:I got it

[SQLGuru]

Have you also considered that there is a base cost for the electronic transaction. A donut shop near my house charges 30 cents for any purchase less than 3 dollars paid for with plastic. That's because they are (I think against the credit company terms) passing the charge on to the customer. Of course, I never get that little, so I don't really worry about it.

So maybe $5 is the point where it's worth handling the transaction and anything less than that actually causes more headache than it would be worth, so giving it away is actually more cost effective.

Layne

Re:I got it

[flitty]

I paid the $5, then proceeded to find other ways to download the album, since the one time download link was broken due to the high traffic. The price is right for an album like this (a bunch of instrumentals). If it were a "real" NIN album, it would be worth a $10 download if it were this easy, and all the artwork came as it did with Ghosts.

Re:I got it

[Hatta]

You haven't heard much NIN I take it. Dissonance is Mr Reznor's forte. He does use a lot of loops, and it can sound pretty mechanical, but it's called Industrial music for a reason. The simplicity of the loops allows him to play one loop off another and build up some amazing polyphonies. Sometimes he'll let a single loop play for a whole song just for tension.

I haven't had a chance to listen to this album yet, but in my experience every NIN album takes a little getting used to at first. I'd recommend starting with Pretty Hate Machine and going from there. If this album is minimalistic, it can be hard to appreciate that minimalism without having been exposed to the maximal version first.

And really, you have to be in the right state of mind to enjoy NIN, and you have to be the right kind of person. It's not always easy to listen to, but life isn't always easy to live. The emotions he's trying to evoke may not always be pleasant, but he does it so brilliantly it's hard to argue he's not a true master of his artform.

Re:I got it

[LingNoi]

No, because as radio head showed, the base cost would be around 75 cents.

Re:I got it

[jsdcnet]

The official site states clearly that all of Volumes I-IV are under Creative Commons share-alike. So technically it is totally kosher for you to download the entire thing without paying NIN, just as long as you don't pay anyone else either. (At least, that's my understanding).

Re:Good news, but how good?

[MaineCoon]

The other prices are astounding:

Free download of 9 songs, with 40-page PDF.
$5 for a one-time-download in one of 3 DRM-free formats, including PDF and many digital extras (wallpapers, etc)
$10 for songs on 2 CDs, PLUS the download
$75 for songs on CDs, plus DVD with all tracks in all digital formats, plus BluRay disc with HD audio and slideshow, plus download

The $5/$10 price points set new precedents... especially considering this is 36 tracks. That's far cheaper than iTunes or normal CDs.

This is great

[spandex_panda]

I guess we all noticed that NiN have an official http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4059158/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_Ghosts_I_(2008)/ account, on which they host the free part I of the new album, in there they admit that

Undoubtedly you'll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file

This is the new wave of music and I am very soon going to order their $10 hard copy! The people who use this modern kind distribution need to be encouraged! Let us all at least pay $5 to support them, you know encourage more folks to use this kind of business model and embrace the future.

Re:What we can learn from this

[FatMullet]

I think the Arctic Monkeys fit the description of unknown band coming to prominence via the internet

ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_monkeysrel=url2html-10233http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_monkeys>

Re:Not that surprising.

[babbling]

creditcard agencies, CD-R manufactucters, ink makers, webhosters and ISPs

They're all necessary, though. The point is that the unnecessary middle-men are gone.

Ghosts I-IV FLAC torrent download here

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ghosts I-IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license."

Excellent, and here it is for download in FLAC!

http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4061815/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_Ghosts_I-IV_%5B2008_FLAC_Lossless%5D

Re:BLU

[Goldberg's Pants]

Erm... No, they don't. Trent has put the REMIX albums up online mostly, as well as instrumental versions of a lot of Downward Spiral onward material. Also there's FINALLY a good quality version of Butch Vig's remix of "Last" which was only ever available in a fucking nasty sounding recording before.

The actual original albums (Pretty Hate Machine, Broken, Downward Spiral, The Fragile etc...) are NOT on there for download.

The new album is interesting. Downloads were a REAL problem but I finally got my FLAC download. WOO!

Re:Good news, but how good?

[LRayZor]

Well as someone who paid the $5, but had the download fail every time after about the first 100 or so kilobytes, the torrent seemed to be the best way to solve the problem.

Re:Awesome!

[zotz]

We are looking for ways to earn some money from our music now. I just re-looked at Sellaband yesterday. The thing is, from what I can tell, we can't do business with them as we want our work to be licensed CC BY-SA and they do not offer us that option. I will probably be contacting them directly to make sure though. Magnatune seems to suffer from the same problem. Jamendo looks like they may work for us.

all the best,

drew

Re:Regarding the $300 option...

[tgd]

Only moronic DJs who can't read.

The site says explicitly that a $39 4 disc vinyl set will be available soon.

The $300 set is for collectors.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[zotz]

"You question whether this is a sustainable business model for the rest of the artists, since you postulate that this is a one time reaction to a novel idea."

Some possibly relevant info:

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-baseballs/
Derek Jeter Autographed Baseball
List Price: $647.35
Our Price: $474.99

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-footballs/
Peyton Manning Autographed Football
List Price: $588.50
Our Price: $467.50

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-basketballs/
LeBron James Autographed Basketball
List Price: $1,412.37
Our Price: $1,049.00

Jordan's is more.

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-golf-balls/
Tiger Woods Autographed Dubai Panoramic Framed 12x30 Photograph
List Price: $1,522.04
Our Price: $1,086.08

I think there is a lot of room for sales with this formula.

all the best,

drew
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/

Re:Slightly offtopic, but...

[spinkham]

It's called magnatune.
http://www.magnatune.com/

All popular formats are available: MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC and AAC. Play your music on any platform: Windows, Mac and Linux. No copy protection (DRM), ever. You can listen to all the music for free in high or low quality mp3 format with commercial type announcements of what you are listening to.
Redownloading is allowed if you provided your email address on purpose.
Of course, they don't have "boy-band-of-the-month", but to me that's a feature.
If you are into hard rock/metal, electronica, new age, or classical it's definitely worth a look.
For pop, not so much, but I'm not really into most of that anyway.
For live music, there's lots of free stuff on http://www.archive.org/details/etree to keep you busy for a while.
If you're tastes are slightly off the beaten track, there's lots of choices for what you want. For getting overproduced RIAA dreck, you're stuck with iTunes, Amazon, or cd's at the moment..

Two words: Amazon S3

[saleenS281]

You're right. There's just NO SERVICE OUT THERE to provide temporary storage, cpu, and bandwidth. There's just NO MARKET for it. NONE.