Fred Benenson comments the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV album over at the Creative Commons blog. The album is a great example that tears apart the arguments put forward by many “content” industry know-it-alls.
The argument, often repeated, is that putting material online will destroy all sales and therefore profits. There are several examples of books making great sales even after the content has been made available for free online. But thick academic books have been seen as a strange exception to the rule. In a recent discussion with a Swedish publisher they included the condition that making material available online only could work in English books – the Swedish market was too small to cope.
But books are not the only successful free content. The Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV album is available online via file sharing networks – the entire content was licensed via Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA) which allowed users to download it legally and many, many did so. But the fascinating thing is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.
NIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.
First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.
The natural question is why fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? According to Fred explanations vary from the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores to the desire of fans to support the music and career of musicians they like.
The point is that “the next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.”
I think the importance of this is overplayed by the CC blog. I doubt that very many people knew the album was available in its entirety for free — the NIN site only offers 1/4 of the songs for free; you have to go searching for the rest. (I and others have made this point on Chris Anderson’s long tail blog.)
Hi Kevin, It is important not to overplay the relationship between free content and the NIN album sales success but I still think that they are a very good example of a band that releases much of their content for free while still making a decent living from record sales. Therefore they go against conventional wisdom.
NIN has a history of releasing music under CC licenses. This strategy creates an additional interest in the band (but does this equal increased sales?). Unfortunately it is difficult to see where NIN would have been if they had not adopted the policy of giving away content – a comparison would have been nice.
Buyers and filesharers are creatures of habit and there are examples of file sharers downloading illegal copies when legal copies are available for free and vice versa.
From a purely commercial standpoint I think me might be looking at an “optimal balance sollution”: a combination of free and paid content.
On the other hand, this balance is somewhat parasitical of the “old” (pay for everything) system. We are not used to having free stuff. If all content was free and everybody had the information and know-how to access it, I doubt that much would be sold (even when it comes to NIN).