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."

Awesome!

[dancingmad (128588)]

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.

Re:Awesome!

[AGMW (594303)]

In short, I am just really happy that a few bands are beginning to pave the way to a world without an RIAA.

It's happening all over - about 18 months ago a new music site called Sellaband [sellaband.com] opened its doors to unsigned Artists around the world. The object is to pre-sell copies of your next album at $10 (US) a piece. Once you hit $50000 you are put into a top studio with top producers and for each $10 Part a Believer purchases they get one copy of the 5000 Limited Edition versions of the album. Regular editions are also made available for the Artist to sell at gigs etc, and now Amazon.co.uk [amazon.co.uk] have signed up to sell them, and even pre-order 100 copies by buying 100 Parts once each Artist reaches $30000.

The Believers then get a share of the advertising revenues, and sales of the regular CD, plus anything they can make on selling any spare Limited Edition CDs, the Artist gets a third, Sellaband [sellaband.com] gets a third and the 5000 Believers share the last third. It's not going to make you a millionaire but its sort of fun!

So far there are over 6000 Artists registered, with 17 having made the $50000, last night Kaitee Page became the latest, and 7 of them now have their albums available from the Sellaband shop [sellaband.com] where you can purchase the CDs or download the tracks - the first three tracks are free and the others are all on 50c (US) each

Re:Awesome!

[somersault (912633)]

Personally, I wouldn't pre-pay $10 for something I've never heard. I'd rather that a band recorded at a cheap-ish record studio and got a few songs recorded. If they then have something worth listening to then I would gladly pre-pay the $10, though I still think $30000 just to record an album is a bit much. I've preferred the recordings we made at £14 an hour to the time we spent £750 for a couple of days of recording and mixing - though the guy at that place obviously just sucked at mixing, it was far too bass heavy so that didn't help my opinion of fancy equipment and recording rates..

Re:Awesome!

[sm62704 (957197)]

Personally, I wouldn't pre-pay $10 for something I've never heard

Me either; but then again I work for a living, like you probably do. Ten bucks is a half case of beer, or a CD (or two) from a local band, or a DVD. I guess it's hard to understand the value of something you have in limitless supply, even if it's something everyone is short of. I think those commercials for Donald Trump's "how to get rich" book are hilarious. WTF does someone born into wealth know about GETTING rich?

I still think $30000 just to record an album is a bit much

I'm afraid the fellow's not going to get much business. Guys I know are recording in professional studios, and even with cover art, commercial duplication, etc it's only costing them a few thousand. Thirty grand is insanely high. Three grand would garner business, thirty is insane.

Re:Awesome!

[zotz (3951)]

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:Awesome!

[JesseMcDonald (536341)]

I'm fairly sure the reason Magnatune et al. only offer the CC "no commercial use" license is that they derive a significant portion of their revenue from their 50% cut of any commercial licensing fees. BY-SA licensing would offer them very little as no one would need to pay extra for commercial licenses.

Re:Awesome!

[pipatron (966506)]

success of this sort will only lead to backlash and a more intense milking of the failing biz plan that they are clinging to

Which will lead to even less CD sales, more public outcry, and even more artists doing the same thing as NIN. Eventually, RIAA won't have any funds left to abuse us with, either by the member companies leaving, or the member companies bleeding dry.

Re:Awesome!

[Xest (935314)]

I like the sentiment of your post, I really do.

But whilst people keep buying products from the likes of Sony et al. such as the PS3, DVDs and so forth then the RIAA isn't going to go away anytime soon by way of financial drought.

Unfortunately the RIAA isn't some isolated entity that can be vanquished, it's made up of a lot of major multi-nationals with massive amounts of resources that can be pooled from other business areas if need be.

The best bet for destroying the RIAA is to ensure the current companies that make up the RIAA don't have control of the next generation of music distribution and that the companies involve in the next generation of music distribution aren't equally as evil as the current generation. Ideally we need to see companies like Sony pull out of their music business altogether in the long term, although that's a tall order and with the massive amount of resources and the massive footing these companies have in the music industry I'd be surprised if we can get them to withdraw altogether.

Re:Awesome!

[ronocdh (906309)]

Ever scorch a set-in tick? They bite harder.

First off, you shouldn't be burning ticks out. Removing with tweezers runs the risk of breaking the tick and thus raises the odds of contracting Lyme disease (among other things, so this method is often used in conjugation with topical antibiotics on hand). A much safer, more reasonable method is to cover the entire area around the tick with petroleum jelly, thereby suffocating the tick.

I bring this up because Trent et al. aren't burning their ticks out, they're suffocating them. They just smear on the Vaseline and forget all about it, going about their business while the tick tries to scramble through the mysterious ooze to get air.

And raking in astounding profit while they're at it, I feel compelled to add.

Re:Awesome!

[penix1 (722987)]

They have already gone this route by trying (and continuing to try) to introduce legislation mandating a "media tax" on all ISPs much like the Canadian blank CD tax. If they can't get their pound of flesh from the artists, they will try the other end of the supply chain...US!

What I can't understand is the media companies keep claiming a decline in sales yet also report record profits. This is more true of the movie industry than the music but still, it doesn't make any logical sense to me. It is like the oil industry claiming to need tax relief while showing record profits. I just don't get it...

Re:Awesome!

[Stanislav_J (947290)]

What I can't understand is the media companies keep claiming a decline in sales yet also report record profits. This is more true of the movie industry than the music but still, it doesn't make any logical sense to me. It is like the oil industry claiming to need tax relief while showing record profits. I just don't get it...

The media companies need those profits to invest in exploration to find new sources of music. Experts believe that music extraction has reached its peak and is now declining. Not to mention the manipulating tactics of OMEC (Organization of Music Exporting Countries). Unless you want to pay $5 per gallon for your music, you shouldn't begrudge those profits.

Good news, but how good?

[Bryan Ischo (893)]

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.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Orlando (12257)]

although I personally wouldn't know a Trent Reznor song from a Barry Manilow song

I guarentee that if I played you one of each you would know the difference :)

Re:Good news, but how good?

[edwardpickman (965122)]

"although I personally wouldn't know a Trent Reznor song from a Barry Manilow song"

"I guarentee that if I played you one of each you would know the difference :)"

Yeah, one is dark, morbid and disturbing, then there's Trent Reznor's music.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[MaineCoon (12585)]

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.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[stephend (1735)]

Yet, as The Register notes, despite the low price "Pirate Bay has eight thousand concurrent downloads at time of writing [theregister.co.uk]." Even if you ignore the RIAA-style maths in calculating lost earnings it's not a good sign that people are not prepared to pay even $5 for 4 CDs worth of music in a DRM-free format.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[LRayZor (872596)]

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.

TPB because NIN.com couldn't hack it

[JasonEngel (757582)]

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.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Dire Bonobo (812883)]

it's not a good sign that people are not prepared to pay even $5 for 4 CDs worth of music in a DRM-free format.

Why? There's a lot of music I wouldn't pay $5 for; most of that I wouldn't bother downloading even if it was free.

Most.

There does indeed exist some music that I wouldn't pay $5 to get access to, but that I'm sufficiently interested in to give a listen to. Having acquired that music, I'd get a chance to listen to it, and decide whether (a) I wanted to buy it, and (b) whether I was interested in acquiring or buying other music from the same artist(s).

$5 is cheap, but not cheap enough to remove all music from the "I'll need to try before buying" category.

Do I think that's what all of those 8,000 concurrent downloads are? Of course not. I do think, though, that the vast majority of those downloads never would have been sales in the first place, and that the number would not be drastically lower even if the official download was free. At a guess, Pirate Bay is simply the default content provider for some people, and it never even occurs to them to look for an "official" provider, regardless of price.

That, and some people are hoarders; I'll bet a fair chunk of those Pirate Bay downloads never get listened to.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Kethinov (636034)]

Maybe.

But if ever there was a man in the perfect position to lead a revolution in the music industry it's Trent Reznor. He's become the de facto figurehead for progress in the music business. And he has all he needs to successfully lead such a revolution: 1. immense fame, 2. immense critical acclaim, 3. a willingness to experiment with radical new business models, and 4. gobs of money to serve as venture capital.

Aside from the possibilities of being totally unaware of his potential or unfortunately unwilling lead the movement as you imply is possible, I can conjure up no reasons as to why he hasn't tried already.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[pipatron (966506)]

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?

No, but all of those that didn't spend $300, but only bought the cheap $5 version, are also listening to a lot of other bands, and would probably buy the $300 collectors edition from some other artist that they love. As you say, people don't have the money to spend $300 on every artist they want to hear, no matter what RIAA claims. Most people do want to spend some amount of money on culture though, and things like this shows that they will do that, even if they can get the content for free by other means.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Stuart Gibson (544632)]

I think that those of us who paid $300+ dollars ($383 to get it to the UK and I expect I'll have import duty to pay on top of that) are the die hard NIN fans. There are maybe two or three other bands that I'd drop that kind of cash on for a single release and I don't think it has anything to do with the business model. NIN are a band that have a lot of very rabid fans and then a lot of others who like their stuff and will happily pay for the $5 or $10 package. Then there are those who will spend the $5 just an a screw you to the RIAA and to show support for the model.

All cult music acts could produce something in this price range and the hardcore will buy it, but I suspect that 2500 was the right number to produce for this. I'm sure they could have sold 5000 copies, but at that point you're probably pushing the market limit of people willing to spend $300 on one album.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[EdIII (1114411)]

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.

There are few things I think you should consider. First FTA:

Each Limited Edition is numbered and personally signed by Trent Reznor. Strictly Limited to 2500 pieces. Limit one per customer.

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.

I would ask this question instead. Is it reasonable to assume that there are 2,500 "hardcore" Nine Inch Nails fans?

The answer, IMO, is yes. I am just like you, and I am not a Nine Inch Nails fan to the point that I can identify their songs on the radio. However, I do know there are plenty of people that love their music. I would be surprised if 5,000 people did not buy the limited edition.

Now I am a big fan of some other bands. Their names are not important. What is important, is that I would consider spending $75 or even $300 on a limited edition album they produce. Especially, since I know that it is direct to the artist, no godless fucking burn-in-the-fiery-pits-of-hell middleman media exec scum (insert more rage against the big media machine here). I would not do it for many, that is sure, but people like me are the reason why I say the limited edition price point will be sustainable. It is just statistics. If a band is popular enough, they will have a small percentage of people willing to pay the higher price points for whatever reason you want to postulate as to why.

So I believe that you are wrong in your assessment that this is unlikely to be repeated. I think that you are correct, in that most fans listen to many artists and have only so much money to spend, and that there are economic considerations here. However, we have not heard what the numbers are for the 5$ and 10$ price points yet. It may turn out to be that it is entirely possible for popular artists to sell competitive price points with iTunes, Amazon, etc. and yet also sell a few thousand die hard fans the much higher price points.

Trent Reznor is also not the first to offer it for free either. Rainbow Whatamacallit band (no offense, i just have no idea which band did it) did something like that awhile ago too. Trent is just adding some price points to it that people can choose right off the bat with different levels of the product being available. Whether or not the next artist is the 2nd to do this, or the 22nd will probably not affect the people that will buy it just to make a statement against DRM either. Point in fact, I am ONE OF THEM.

I can also see a huge appeal to bypass Big Entertainment, and deal with Artists directly. To say that the RIAA and the MPAA (MAFIAA) have done a lot of damage with public relations, is a whopper of an understatement. There is a backlash against them right now and the whole paradigm they shove down our throats that we "don't own our music" and cannot do what we want with it. So there may be a huge number of people, that although not paying for music now, will rush to the Internet to support the "cause" and their favorite Artists. Combine those people, with the people that make up the sales on Amazon and iTunes alone, and that represents a huge amount of potential business.

Your question is certainly insightful, however I think you are wrong in your assessment.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[zotz (3951)]

"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/ [sportsmemorabilia.com]
Derek Jeter Autographed Baseball
List Price: $647.35
Our Price: $474.99

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

http://www.sportsmemorabilia.com/sports-memorabilia/autographed-basketballs/ [sportsmemorabilia.com]
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/ [sportsmemorabilia.com]
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/ [blogspot.com]

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Bogtha (906264)]

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.

Of course other artists won't be as successful. Of course these types of profits aren't sustainable. Is that a bad thing?

These guys are entertainers, and yet a lot of people seem to think that they automatically deserve to be multi-millionaires. That's insane. They don't build houses for people to live in. They don't grow food for people to eat. They don't advance our understanding of the world. They are modern day jesters, a distraction when you have nothing better to do.

I like music as much as the next person, but please let us have some perspective here. If musicians don't make a lot of money, that's absolutely fine. A million bucks is something a musician should work a lifetime to achieve, not something they can pick up from a year's work with one album. And it's sure as hell not society's job to subsidise them with copyrights until they are filthy rich.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[SailorSpork (1080153)]

Would they spend $300, or anything close to it, for special edition releases of albums from all the other artists they like? Probably not

No, maybe not them, but maybe 750 of the biggest fans of that other band that didn't like NIN would. In fact, maybe some of the NIN 750 would too, you'd be surprised.

The point is, with all these different pricing schemes, NIN is doing what marketers would call segmenting the market to attain better pricing discrimination [wikipedia.org], getting the most out of consumers by getting them to pay more for the album if they value it more. Bigger fans will pay more, while most people are more price sensitive, etc. This means that NIN is getting more money overall than if they had released the album at just $10.

While doing something like this at a retail store is very hard logistically because brick-and-mortar store would need to keep multiple SKU's in stock for each item (and the rare few $750 fans would be few and far between, so the package might sit for a very long time before being discounted or sent back), in a central online retail store this is a lot more practical. Not only is NIN cutting out the RIAA middleman, they're also cutting out the retail middleman, while setting up different price points so that they get the most value out of each customer. Clever, Trent.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[badpauly (1158327)]

The fan-base may be due to the label, but the 'anti-label' mentality that Trent/NIN has is also due to the label. TR/NIN has been pushed by the labels, as most bands have, for his entire career. His second release almost never made it, with the label blocking all attempts at recording, and resulted in him recording in secret, at his expense, in order to complete. That release won him a Grammy. His label attempted to block him appearing on an EP, resulting in the releasing artist distorting his vocals and claiming it was someone else. These are just two of many instances where the label tried to block the artist, while complaining the artist doesn't do enough for them. And they then wonder why the bands fight back? TR/NIN now have almost everything they have released available for free download, are now releasing music in a non-traditional manner, and making a damn good show of it. A few more releases from a few more bands like this, and we will hopefully see the death of the old-school mentality in record labels, and a shift towards a fairer industry that will benefit all parties - and not just the suits on the top-floors of the labels.

Re:Good news, but how good?

[Coryoth (254751)]

I think that raises another point about Ghosts that has been largely missed: this isn't an otherwise terribly marketable album, at least not from a label perspective. It's 36 varied purely instrumental tracks with no catchy singles, no hooks, and nothing ideal for radio play. If Trent had handed this to a major label they would probably have just quietly buried it. Yes, there are niche labels for this kind of material out there (Warp being the most prominent that comes to mind), but they don't exactly have major marketing budgets. I suspect Ghosts will get far more listeners who weren't already fans going this route.

What a shock

[damburger (981828)]

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.

Re:What a shock

[pipatron (966506)]

This is a very interesting point, especially if you take into consideration that the people who don't play nice in this setting, won't disrupt the nice people's experience, and thus there's no need for any punishment or law against it.

In the real world were the people who don't believe in imaginary property lives, anyone that doesn't play nice can cause a lot of harm to us that do, so sometimes we need to write laws preventing people from harming others.

Convenience and Patronage

[Rufus211 (221883)]

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.

I hope this works. But for the secondary effects.

[Thanshin (1188877)]

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.

Slightly offtopic, but...

[Aaron Isotton (958761)]

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.

Show me an unkown band...

[clickety6 (141178)]

...doing well by selling like this, then I'll believe a change is coming. So far the only bands making a killing this way are those that have been over-hyped and shoved down our throats for years by the record labels so they are already (in)famous.

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.

One thing not being mentioned: Control

[Chonine (840828)]

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.

Re:BLU

[splutty (43475)]

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.

Re:Not that surprising.

[klingens (147173)]

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.

Re:Not that surprising.

[definate (876684)]

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.

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:

1. Retail outlets
2. Labels (Recording company)
3. Labels (Publishers)
4. Credit Card Agencies
5. CD-R manufacturers
6. ink makers
7. web hosters
8. ISPs

After:

1. Retail outlets
2. Credit Card Agencies
3. CD-R manufacturers
4. ink makers
5. web hosters
6. ISPs

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.

Re:Not that surprising.

[babbling (952366)]

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.

Re:Not that surprising.

[WNight (23683)]

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.

Re:What we can learn from this

[raehl (609729)]

*ESTABLISHED* artists should charge large amounts for their music.

The problem with all these experiments is they involve artists who at some point had the backing of a record company.

We've yet to see any artist make big bucks without, at some point, the benefit of the record company marketing machine.

Re:What we can learn from this

[FatMullet (1086469)]

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-10233 [slashdot.org]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_monkeys>

Re:Cardiologist's dream

[snl2587 (1177409)]

This was an experiment for Trent, but it cost the **AA more than he could have ever imagined. Yes, I did say **AA. Believe me when I say they are watching what happens to the RIAA with great interest.

And the real kicker? This was also experimental music. Imagine the profit margin if he had used his normal material.

Re:I got it

[Admiral Ag (829695)]

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.

Re:I got it

[jsdcnet (724314)]

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:I got it

[CastrTroy (595695)]

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.

Re:I got it

[Hatta (162192)]

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

[aurispector (530273)]

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.

Re:I got it

[CastrTroy (595695)]

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.

Re:I got it

[palme999 (82528)]

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.