Nine Inch Nails Free Ghosts I-IV
NIN Scares up Big Business for New Album without Record Company
Nine Inch Nails release Ghosts I-IV, a spooky new collection of experimental instrumental songs, online for free, yet fans still pay up to $300 for physical copies.
Following in the footsteps of Jane SIberry and Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album, Ghosts I-IV, as a download only. Unlike Radiohead, who released In Rainbows last October with a price tag of what ever fans wanted to pay, Nine Inch Nails came up with another, possibly more lucrative business model to sell Ghosts I-IV online.
Ghosts for Free
Available exclusively from the Nine Inch Nails website in 4 different schemes, fans have the choice of downloading the first 9 songs for free, paying a fixed price of $5 for the entire 36-song collection or downloading the same package and receiving a CD via mail for $10.
For the ultimate collectible, fans also had the chance to order a limited edition package that included a deluxe edition with a hardcover book and a Blu-Ray disc for $75 or the $300 ultra deluxe edition that includes vinyl albums and an autograph by band leader Trent Reznor.
While vinyl albums may seem like an object from 10,000 B.C. to today’s music fan raised on P2P downloading, the $300 package sold out in a matter of days upon release.
Demand for the new internet-only album reached peaks so high fans crashed the Nine Inch Nails website trying to download their copy when the music became available, according to Information Week.
NIN Scares Music Industry
Ghosts I-IV is the follow up to Year Zero, which debuted and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard top 200 albums tally in April 2007. Ghosts I-IV differs from the standard pop album in that this double disc of entirely instrumental music created by Reznor, with help from special guests Alessandro Cortini, a frequent tour keyboardist from Italy, Adrian Belew (King Crimson), and Brian Viglione of the caberet punk outfit Dresden Dolls, would not have been a highly marketable tool for music companies to promote.
Nine Inch Nails’ new formula, however, has already proven lucrative. Not only did the entire 2500 limited edition package costing $300 each sell out in mere days, but InformationWeek.com reported that 37 percent of fans who downloaded Ghosts I-IV, paid for the album.
On March 13, 2008 Billboard reported that first week sales of Ghosts I-IV tallied $1.6 million in revenue, according to the band, with just under 800,000 downloads. In comparison, the number one album of the same week, Janet Jackson's Discipline sold 181,000 copies in the US. Further proof that the Internet music business pays off.
On the other hand, Radiohead never released statistics concerning the prices paid for In Rainbows or the number of copies downloaded before the band released the physical CD on January 1, 2008 and shut down the free site.
Despite the lack of physical product at the time, Billboard magazine named Radiohead’s In Rainbows the number 1 album of 2007.
A physical release for Ghosts I-IV is slated for April 7 with “more volumes of Ghosts are likely to appear in the future,” according to Reznor.
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