Nine Inch Nails Pushes Onward In Digital Music Distribution Experimentation
Continuing their ongoing digital music experimentations, Nine Inch Nails has released a new instrumental album online named Ghosts I-IV.
Like Radiohead’s In Rainbows before it, you can choose the price you pay – but things are a bit more defined this time. You can pay either:
- Nothing and get Ghosts I which is 9 high-quality DRM-free tracks and the PDF of the album notes.
- $5 and get all 36 tracks of Ghosts I-IV and a 40-page PDF booklet. These tracks are available in a number of formats.
- $10 and you get Ghosts I-IV in a 2 CD set. This physical version will be available April 8th, but if you order you can download all the tracks immediately.
- $75 and you get the deluxe edition package including the 2 CDs, 1 data DVD with all the tracks in various formats, and a Blu-ray disc filled with ultra high-quality audio.
- $300 and you get everything in the $75 package plus 4 LP vinyl records and two limited edition Giclee prints.
It will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out for them in terms of sales. I’ll be downloading the free version first because, why not? If I like that I’ll “upgrade” to the $5 version.
I think this is exactly the kind of experimentation bands ought to be doing as digital music continues to take over. Of course, as with Radiohead’s album, this will only work initially for bands that are already popular – but in the future we could see a lot more of this from many different artists.
[UPDATE]: After about an hour of trying on and off I still cannot get on the site to download the album. Perhaps they should have worked to distribute the free copy via BitTorrent.
More thoughts:
