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.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Semantic Web will never work because it depends on businesses working together, on them cooperating.

We are talking about the most conservative bunch of people in the world, people who believe in greed and cut-throat business ethics. People who would steal one another’s property if it weren’t nailed down. People like, well, Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

And they’re all going to play nice and create one seamless Semantic Web that will work between companies – competing entities choreographing their responses so they can work together to grant you a seamless experience?

I think the author is right about one thing – big business is not a big fan of an open, sharing web and will fight it tooth and nail in the name of profit. My feeling however is that business really does not have a choice in the matter. The web is built on a very open, uncontrollable model – opening up infinite possibilities for individuals, competitors and or startups to ruin them in a heartbeat. The web is moving towards a more open model, like it or not. We do not rely on big business, big business relies on us. If corporations do not want to work in that model, all it takes is $15 for a domain name, $100 a month for hosting and word of mouth for some David to take down Goliath.

The web, since its inception, has been moving towards more a open and communal sense of data. Information and content is shared more than ever on the web. The author is correct in his statement about business – big business has fought it tooth and nail. Nevertheless, the trend towards a more open internet has continued, and if anything, has grown. Not all business is against this movement however – many successful startups have become what they are due to their willingness to share data. The list is too large to fully divulge, but Flickr, YouTube and Digg are three of the most obvious. These companies became what they are today because they shared their content freely and took the user’s experience seriously. Of course, Flickr and YouTube have been purchased by “big business”, but the corporate big-wigs are not dumb – they know that the very success of these sites depends on their open attitude towards information and content. To break those models would surely stifle the success of their newly acquired site and, in turn, stifle their own business. If, for whatever reason, the corporation still decided to do it, there would be numerous sites popping up overnight to try to fill the void.

Most of the true innovation on the internet is not done by big business. Because of the relatively low overhead to start a medium-sized website, very little gets in the way of smart people with smart ideas creating smart web sites. While big business is trying to figure out how they can monetize their web properties, small businesses, startups and individuals are innovating. Of course, many of these innovators will get snatched up by “larger fish” which can lead towards two different directions. The first is that the new owner tries to modify it to their financial agenda. This method has caused many good sites to (very) bad (very) quickly and many times the community does not even stay there long even to witness it. The second direction is that the site gets purchased and is relatively left alone to continue doing what it was doing. YouTube, del.icio.us and Flickr (to a certain extent) seem to fall under that umbrella up to this point. The model opens up the opportunity to slowly move big business towards a more open philosophy. They may not want it, but if the want to compete, they are going to have to eventually.

If the internet was like cable, I would completely agree with the author – however, that is far from the case. Big business accounts for a mere fraction of the content on the internet. With the takeoff of blogging, that fraction is only going to continue to go down. The only advantage business has on the web is money – something that may not be as potent as we think. The majority of successes on the internet have been due to a revolutionary concept, the fostering of a strong community or the publishing of highly desired content. None of these three qualities can come from money alone. Money always helps, but it is not the end-all-be-all. There are even times where I think money could be a hindrance…

I do agree with the author that big business will never volunteer to play nice. The problem is, if they continue to decide to play the way they are playing, the rest of the internet will leave and start their own game.