If you have been reading this blog for even a moderate length of time, you are most likely aware of the unusually high amount of Nine Inch Nails articles on this site (seen here and here to name a few). Considering the general theme of this blog, I could see how this could be seen as strange to many. Still, I tend to write a lot about how digital media (which design-technology intersects with) is changing not only mainstream media, but the society which consumes it – which in turn impacts how we do our work. For the past two years, Nine Inch Nails has really been on the frontlines of pushing media away from the consolidated, copyright-heavy, corporate-run model to a distributed, grassroots, artist-run model.
Last night, Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I-IV, an independently-produced album that is available for download for the price of $5. There are 36 songs in this album, so that $5 looks even more reasonable than ever. For those of you into the tangible, CDs can be purchased as well. Additionally, 9 songs are available completely for free – no questions asked. While this is distribution model is new, it is not new – we have seen it with In Rainbows and Niggy Tardust, each with their own little tweaks on it. However, make no mistake, Ghosts is unlike any other album distribution we have seen.
Up till now, the music industry has either fought or ignored the possibilities that the internet has brought to media distribution and consumption. Ghosts represents the largest initiative (that I am aware of) to harness the online potential to its fullest – from promotion to distribution. I want to go through each piece of the puzzle to explain why I think Ghosts could be the beginning of how music is promoted and sold.
Promotion
As far as I am aware, this album was simply released through an update on nin.com, with emphasis on readers to Digg the release. As expected, the article quickly jumped to the front page of Digg as well as Reddit. This immediately sent tens of thousands of people to the site on a Sunday night… That in and of itself is amazing. The initial social bookmarketing buzz has brought a swath across the blogosphere (3,459 results via Google Blog Search as I write this). From the looks of it, there was no traditional press release for this album, rather a concentrated online-only effort all through free, community-driven channels.
I must admit, I was a little surprised to not see any major social-networking initiatives – for instance, the NIN MySpace page has no word of the release.
Outreach
Nine Inch Nails has used PirateBay for small leaks in the past, but the 9 free songs from the album were released to PirateBay officially through NIN. What has been the scourge of the RIAA has become a promotion/distribution tool for Ghosts. Think about it, buzz is created, appetites are whet and bandwidth is saved. Sounds like a smart plan to me.
The notion of buy-before-you-listen is also tackled with being able to listen to the entire album in what seems to be a random order. This is another huge move towards fixing a major problem with online music distribution.
Sales/Distribution
All sales of this album seem to be through internet channels – either directly from the official Ghosts site or through Amazon. There seems to be no brick-and-mortar component to the sale model – everything is through the browser. Because of this, I am assuming overhead is lowered, hence the $10 cost of a 2-CD set. When was the last time you saw a $10 sticker price for a 2-CD album?
For those who chose the download-only version of the album, there is a 40-page PDF to accompany the music. Once again, digital delivery of a previously tangible-only medium. Nine Inch Nails started doing this with With Teeth, but nothing close to this scale.
Copyright
Of all the areas that excited me about this release, copyright is by far the greatest piece. As expected, all music downloaded from this album is 100% DRM-free, hence the nod to Amazon’s DRM-free structure. Most of us knew that would be the case. What blew me away however was that the 9 free songs released were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0. Creative Commons was obviously excited by the move as is evident in their blog post. This license allows anyone to share, distribute, alter or use these 9 songs in any way for non-commercial work with credit given to the artist. That is flat-out groundbreaking.
Ghosts is as much an idea as it is an album
So in review, you have an album which is solely owned by the artist, is promoted seemingly exclusively through online channels, sold and distributed exclusively through online channels (including “illegal” p2p networks), with one quarter of the music both monetarily and copyright free. With the exception of Amazon, the traditional middle-man is completely left in the cold. To say this is ambitious is the understatement of the year. Many of these topics had been address before, but not all at once and not in such an organized manner.
In all honesty, no one knows what the future model for the music industry will be, but everyone knows the status quo will not be it. What Ghosts represents is an artist relying almost completely on the internet as the solutions to what others feel are the problems. Ghosts is not just music, it is an idea of how the entire lifespan of a piece of media could exist. When you see all the pieces come together, it is hard to tell if many ideas were intentionally thought up or just subconsciously come to due to the basic nature of the web. The open-source, free-information model of the internet is spilling over its online boundaries and starting to leave marks on social interaction, politics, and yes, media.
This is why I am so fascinated about this subject. As a design technologist, the web model impacts my thinking and concepting on a daily basis. I have bought into the notion that information is free which is why I release all my code as open-source and free to use. But code is not the only thing that is moving towards and open nature – everything is. From design work to architectural drawings to personal information – I do not see much that will not be covered by this ideological umbrella in the future. This is something we need to be aware of in our work as designers or as developers. Information’s new natural state is openness. We can either fight it, or work with it. Ghosts has definitely put a strong foot in the latter camp.
