Trent Reznor rejoiced when his contract with a major label lapsed.
He felt he could finally make new kinds of music and make music for himself and his fans — not just music that his labeled wanted. Nine Inch Nails’ latest album Ghosts I-IV embodies the bands newfound freedom. The album, from a popular industrial rock band, is completely instrumental. It’s closer to a classical music album than a typical rock album.
It’s the kind of music that no major label would ever produce, especially since it weighs in at 36 tracks and nearly two hours of music, and you won’t see Ghosts in typical stores like Best Buy. If you want it, you have to order it online.
NIN is offering the first nine tracks from Ghosts as a free 320 kbps download (higher quality than iTunes or Amazon sells music in). The whole album is available for download for $5. That may seem really cheap, but if an artist doesn’t have a label taking the vast majority of revenue, an artist can charge a lot less and still make a nice amount of money.
Ghosts is also offered as a $10 two-CD set that also includes digital files (either MP3s or lossless; your choice). But things get really interesting beyond that: NIN is offering two deluxe versions, one selling for $75 and the other $300. Sounds pretty crazy, right?
That $300 package is the kind of package that a major label artist could never release: It comes with all the music on standard CDs, a Blue-Ray DVD with all the audio in high def, a data DVD with every song in multitrack format so they can be remixed and reconstructed in audio editing programs like Garageband or Logic, three booklets of images and art and more. Plus every package is individually numbered and signed by Trent Reznor himself.
The $300 version sold out of all 2,500 copies in less than a day. That’s $750,000 on day 1 from only one of four distribution options NIN set up. The $75 version also offers the data CD of multitrack songs, which I’m willing to bet will be rather popular. Imagine being able to completely change an artists music (the guitars, vocals, drums, bass, effects, etc are all in separate tracks) and make your own music.
This album would have never been released on a major label, and that’s because it will probably never be a big enough commercial success to ever make enough money to spend millions on music videos and marketing. But on the Internet, you don’t need millions in marketing and music videos — you just need a Web site.
And yet NIN will make millions off of this latest release. That’s because they’ve completely left behind old distribution models and tried something new.
The point is there is money — a lot of money — to be made in new, online distribution models. Don’t let the past slow you down or hold you back.
