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Ghosts I-IV
March 14, 2008Trent Reznor went for the big time and won big.
The Nine Inch Nails' frontman decided to release his band's news creative offering online, and boy has it been successful.
Since the album was released March 2 about 750,000 downloads have been tallied.
I read original story on an off-spin of a Ticketmaster.com website. To me those totals are amazing. Radiohead did the same thing and I think bands must branch out by putting stuff up for free on their website.
A lot of kids don't want to spend $15 to test a band out. Sure they might like one or two songs, but that's not why they're buying it.
I praise Reznor for his decision to market his album online. He had different options -- for free (9 tracks), $5 for everything, $10 for download and CD, $75 for the secret series and $300 for the super-secret series.
On March 10, a week after the album went on sale, all of the 2,500 editions of the $300 version were sold out.
No matter what you charge the idea will work. The band still stands to make profits. Even if you don't rake it in initially, money is there to be made.
After Radiohead released their album nationally on CD they stormed to the top of the Billboard 100 charts for sales. How did they do it?
Well, Radiohead is a heck of a band with a religious-like following. They did it for free or for pay and they still rocked out with their downloads out.
So here's to Reznor. Hopefully more and more bands will follow.
Posted by Clayton Hein at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
