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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."
As big name artists like NIN and Radiohead pave they way, I fervently hope and pray we are seeing the end of the RIAA.
I haven't bought an American CD in years because of how the RIAA strong armed colleges and effectively shut down web radio.
This system is far fairer to the artists as well; they get a far bigger piece of the pie. There will be fallout for artists I am sure, but I think it will lead to a far richer music industry in the U.S.
In short, I am just really happy that a few bands are beginning to pave the way to a world without an RIAA.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Obviously you've never heard Nine Inch Nails live, or on CD for that matter. Trent doesn't need to artificially 'noise himself', really. He does that well enough on his own (with the help of his ever changing band, of course)
I'd say go and download his music, and you'll see what I mean.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
That is good news for artists who want to publish their own music. Clearly such a business model can be successful for the artist.
However, is this success likely to be duplicated? Is it just because this concept is so novel that so many people were willing to pay so much for the special edition? Would that many people line up to buy the special edition of his next album? Are other artists as likely to experience this success once such things become more mainstream and less unique?
Part of the criteria that people use in deciding the value of something is how rare and unusual it is, and since this is one of the first such instances of an artist-produced album, I wonder if the profits that Trent Reznor has enjoyed here will be sustainable for other artists.
Consider: all of the people who paid $300 for his special edition release, probably listen to many other artists as well. Would they spend $300, or anything close to it, for special edition releases of albums from all the other artists they like? Probably not; most almost certainly couldn't afford to pay $300 x N artists x M albums; Trent was savvy enough to do it first, so he gets to enjoy what is likely an unsustainable pricing model.
I'm not trying to belittle his accomplishment, which is awesome (although I personally wouldn't know a Trent Reznor song from a Barry Manilow song, I'm glad that someone is pushing the boundaries for music distribution and trying to fix the music publishing system), I'm just trying to point out that anyone who thinks that all artists can be this successful, need to realize that this is unlikely to be duplicated, based on purely economic considerations.
In order to make huge amounts of money, artists should charge huge amounts for their music.
When people are given choices, they are often through their own free will kind to other human beings. There is no need for guns pointing at peoples heads to make us play nice and share - we will do it naturally if left alone.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Labels, retail outlets, etc are cut out, replaced by creditcard agencies, CD-R manufactucters, ink makers, webhosters and ISPs. Overall the new middlemen are more efficient and differect, yes, but they are still middlemen.
One role that the "new middlemen" fill very well is promotion, the traditional role of the label. NIN is in a good position right now since the whole media does that for free for them: they are an established act and do something new and to spite the established power structure. So it's news and gets reported generating publicity. New bands won't have that luxury unfortunately.
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.
like phosphorescent desert buttons singing one familiar song
And the real kicker? This was also experimental music. Imagine the profit margin if he had used his normal material.
I think this shows the future of where, IMHO, the music industry, or at least individual artists, should be going: convenience and patronage. People are realizing that the inherent value of a CD, and especially of a downloaded mp3, is pretty close to $0. The main reason to spend money on an inherently worthless mp3 is for convenience: $1 and 1 minute to itunes, or $0 and searching the pirate bay / mucking with bittorrent. The other reason is because you genuinely like the music and want to support the band, so give them money for the sake of giving them money.
This NIN experiment shows it clearly: there's $0 of inherent value in the songs themselves, as they are CC licensed and can legally be copied. For the convenience factor $5 or $10 gets you the mp3s or 4 CDs - pretty hard to beat (ignoring NIN's site being hammered the last few days). The $75 set is clearly patronage; you get the shiny book and some extra CDs with it, but you're really spending the money because you want to give NiN the money. The $300 level is an odd one, as it's a combination of patronage and market speculation for resale.
Nice initiative.
:(){
One role that the "new middlemen" fill very well is promotion, the traditional role of the label. NIN is in a good position right now since the whole media does that for free for them: they are an established act and do something new and to spite the established power structure. So it's news and gets reported generating publicity. New bands won't have that luxury unfortunately. I like your comparison, labels are cut out, however you go wrong after that. Retail outlets are free to purchase the CD, and have the buying power to most likely purchase it for less than we can. So they haven't been cut out. Credit card agencies, cd-r manufacturers, ink makers, web hosters and ISPs aren't the replacement. These were there in the other system, so that makes the other system not just inefficient but grossly inefficient.
Before:
After:
It's not that big of a change, however it's far better for their customers, much more efficient and in turn far better for them.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't buy modern music, but just because I don't hear it. However, I do hope that musicians finally manage to remove the middle man and start distributing their own music and receiving the full payment.
The main reason of this hope is not for my love for musicians but for the effect this can have in every other business based in mass distribution of copies of a data item.
Photography, novels, software, all may find ways of receiving direct payment from the consumer.
I really hope that this trend continues. I'd love to see something like this:
An online music store with all kinds of music (like the iTunes store), but:
- No DRM *at all*.
- Previews as MP3. Say, the first 30 secs of every track. The first 50% would be better. Should be "kind of good quality", say >= 128kbit.
- All tracks in at least the following formats:
- MP3 "good quality", say >= 256 kbit
- Lossless in a free, open format. Flac in other words.
- The ability to use the store from the web.
- The ability to put multiple tracks in a "cart" and download the whole cart as a zip would be a big plus.
- An open API for different clients would be a huge plus.
- And, last but not least, the ability to have some sort of "account" and to re-download tracks I already purchased, whenever, wherever and how many times I want to.
It would be ok if the tracks are somehow watermarked, i.e. if they can tell from a file which user downloaded a track and block his or her account if they are redistributing the tracks.
I would also appreciate formats "better than CD", e.g. Flac tracks in DVD Audio quality (24 bit, 96 kHz if I'm not mistaken). I'd also appreciate album covers and similar stuff.
I am prepared to pay for a quality product I can use for years to come. I am not prepared to pay for some badly encoded track I can use on few specific players, and I do *not* want to re-buy everything if I switch players/want higher quality etc.
Just had to say that.
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.
There are costs, but middlemen are people between you and the customer. Here it seems like Trent could walk down the street handing out CDs and collecting money, all of which he gets to keep.
I don't mind businesses existing to do middlemen things, but I do mind the exclusive way they act and how all services are bundled. If you want shelf space in any store, you take the full line of RIAA 'services' for 95% of the profit.
In the future, ideally, even if you end up paying 95% of your revenue in services, it'll be to people you choose for services you actually want. In that market a smart business owner could make a lot more money by handling the arrangement of these services and skimping on stuff they don't want.
For instance, album art. That may have mattered on records (large area) and for retail sales, but what's the point of some little picture associated with the MP3/Ogg? There's a savings for the e-market only musician.
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!
I'm downloading the lossless version now. Mr Reznor is more than welcome to my 5 bucks. I hadn't listened to NIN since the nineties when one of my room mates used to blast "Closer" all the time. Not my kind of thing, but I figured there was nothing to lose in downloading the free tracks from "Ghosts" yesterday. I'm a big Brian Eno fan, so I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it.
This is how it should be. I would never have even listened to this album if I hadn't been able to try out those tracks for free. Being able to download DRM free in lossless is the killer. I hope this is a massive success for NIN to encourage other artists to do the same.
I really like how he has taken advantage of the digital format to make the album art for each song different. It shows up in iTunes album view with the regular cover, but if I play it on my iPod Touch the art (which is damn cool BTW) changes with each song. It's a nice little effect.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
If Mr Razor was an unknown releasing his first album this way, their would be far fewer people willing to pay $300 for a limited edition set and far fewer people even paying $5 for the normal set... assuming we even knew it was available.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I wonder: how many of those 8k concurrent connections are from people who paid the money but couldn't download their digital purchase from NIN.com because of how incapable the servers were of handling the demand? I for one bought the $10+$6.99S&H CD set, then spent the next 6 hours repeatedly trying and failing to download the Apple Lossless files for which I paid. Once those files appeared on The Pirate Bay, I jumped on that torrent and downloaded from there in a matter of minutes. I'm messing with the statistics by doing that, and I would argue that many other people did likewise.
The pipes were clogged!
Seriously, I wouldnt blame NiN. As much of a pain in the ass as this is, look at the bright side; it's the beginning of a new era in music that doesn't include the corporations. There is bound to be some hiccups and you can bet that the people in charge of the website sales are overwhelmed. Patience.
On the other hand, I still think they got the pricing wrong even at about 14 cents per track. Everyone knows that all of the tracks will be up on torrents immediately. The price is really a reflection of how badly you want to support the artist. All the tracks should be available for free, or at least with flexible pricing like radiohead. I'd be willing to guess they would make about the same amount of money since the folks that dont want to pay will simply download torrents, whereas the ones that want to show support will pay.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
I downloaded the first free album just to see if it was worth purchasing. I was extremely disappointed. One song consisted of the same 11 notes played over and over again for 3 minutes. One song had so much distortion it was painful to listen to. A lot of it sounded like the soundtrack to Alone In The Dark, or some other similarly themed game. The music was extremely repetive. Most of the songs were extremely simple, and were basically the equivalent musically of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", although the song sounded a little darked. I'm not sure why everybody thinks it's so great. I love that bands are starting to have much better online music offerings, and breaking away from the labels. However I found that this album just isn't something that I enjoy listening to.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's where corporations like Apple or other dedicated online music stores can really help out though. It's not cost efficient for most bands to buy the necessary servers just for the 1-2 week period following the album's release. You probably won't find many hosting providers that want to sell you a ton of traffic for 2 weeks, and then have your usage drop to 5% of that. I think that with all the rage over this type of distribution, there really needs to be a more efficient way to distribute it. First, if you want it free, it should be bittorrent only. That would get rid of a lot of congestion. I would also like to see something from bittorrent where you make your purchase, get a key, and enter that into the application. After you enter a valid key, you're allowed to join the torrent. You'd need a central server for key verification, but that would be a lot easier to setup, and not overload, than everybody trying to download the music off a single server.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think an important thing to mention to those that are not NIN fans is how this release was announced.
It wasn't.
Two hours before this album was released online, there was an ominous "Two hours..." message posted at nin.com
Then, BAM, new album. Even the most die-hard NIN fan had no clue it was coming. Where as before the marketing procedure took months, and there were many slow leaks in the process, this time Trent was in control.
Make an album, make artwork, set up servers, release online. Its a good setup. Do you have any idea about the kind of label BS that you have to go through with an album? The promotion, the radio samplers, the flyers, posters, it is a lot of time and effort - there is like a 3 month window for it all. Here, Trent took his 10 weeks to make it, and then pretty much put it on his website.
You can bet the next album has an even shorter window, and again he is in control of its secrecy. I've never before seen someone announce *and* release an album on the same day, and with Trent's history, he was the last person I expected it from.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I completely agree. And yes, I also paid - but after I downloaded the free first volume and listened. This is a perfect example of how artists should promote their music. And the artwork, oh the artwork. Really beautiful.
:(){
This is where services like Amazon's S3 makes sense (http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261).
Traffic on demand and you only pay for what you use. Pricing is under $0.18 per GB transferred.
To answer your question, what everyone thinks is so great about the album isn't necessarily just the music, but how it was released. It's the option to listen before you invest that got me. Personally, I like the ambient nature of the album. I think it's great to work to, and the argument that it is too "simple" is like telling Jackson Pollock that your kid could paint that shit - his response: "so what do you have against your kid?" Like a beautiful mountain or a fart in the car, it's there for you to enjoy as much or as little as you want. What NIN has done here is shown us that music doesn't have to be over-produced, over-polished, and over-priced in order for it to be exceptionally profitable. And that is very important for an allegedly ailing music industry.
The point is, if you enjoy it, great - you can buy more if you want, or even download the torrent of the full thing without paying a dime and no one is going to come after you. And if you don't like it, you haven't lost anything except some time. It is the gesture that's important. I bought the physical media because I like the album enough to do so, and you're free to go back to listening to whatever you were listening to before none the poorer.
If, in your mind, this is a mediocre album, well that's even more ammunition to fire at the RIAA when you consider that a mediocre album did $750,000 in sales in two days, and that's with the least common price point. If anything, this album is proof that the RIAA is a dinosaur that deserves to go extinct, and making that statement so profoundly makes this album a significant milestone, and a significant work of art.
Would buy again.
I agree that this is a much better approach than the traditional. I applaud NIN for wanting to find a consumer-friendly way to do business, and for actually getting out there and doing something about it.
.WAV files; this idea lends itself well to some styles of music, but not others IMO. (Of course, it would be up to each artist to figure out what premium offerings would make sense with their particular music. Does every musician have the additional skills and insight to do that? Should every musician have to?)
Undeniably this worked beautifully for Ghosts I-IV. I have my doubts that it could work for a lot of music, though. A few points of perspective:
1) NIN are an established band with a following of fans who would buy a $300 limited edition package. Not all bands have that. And no, it's not just because some bands suck -- it's also because some are just starting out. Could NIN have done this with their first album?
2) The free release included 1/4 of the material. For a "normal" single-disc mainstream release, that's like releasing two or three tracks for promotional purposes. This is not unusual (though the normal delivery mechanism is "radio" rather than "digital download"). To be fair, there are two major differences:
a) The scale of the release and the low pricetag for the first paid tier are such that arguably if you pay the $5 you already know you'll get $5 of value, even if you don't like the remaining 3/4 of the music... With mainstream music, you buy a $10-$20 CD and still might only like the two songs you'd already heard... But part of the reason NIN can do that is, they can cut out a middle-man. They don't need a label to make them known -- see point (1) above.
b) Not clear to me whether the Creative Commons license applies to the whole thing, or just Volume I. If it applies to the whole thing, then presumably there will be a free, legal option for getting the entire release as soon as someone puts it on a p2p network... But whether that's the case, or in any case the impact of that variable on the experiment as a whole, isn't yet clear to me.
3) One of the big draws of the $75 package vs. the $10 package would be the session
The tiered product structure isn't unique, though this takes it up a notch. That's the big thing to me: This is great in that NIN is pushing their product "the right way", but it relies on a little innovation and a lot of leveraging their established position. Not enough innovation to be the future of music; just a step in the right direction.
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).
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