Some Random Dude » NIN

Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts Album is About MUCH More Than Music.

P.J. Onori — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:47:35 +0000

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.

NIN Remix – UGC Strain Mutates Towards Music

P.J. Onori — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:55:57 +0000

We all know what video UGC has done to change the face of modern media. Video is beginning to show signs of a strong bottom-up structure forming. In turn, mainstream media has had to adapt by both slowly integrating UGC into their model and putting their content onto UGC networks. While video UGC has taken off, music has not followed suit due, almost assuredly, to the music industry’s absolute resistance to evolve. Until now, the stonewalling of progress by the RIAA and other music industry leaders has been relatively successful in terms of the big picture. There are no YouTube scale sites offering independent, community created music. In my opinion, there is plenty of talent out there, but these sorts of movements usually need a jumpstart in order to pull in the combination of a large community and ample traffic to become self-sustaining. For YouTube, the early inclusion of unwarranted copyrighted video (whether intentional or unintentional) was that jumpstart – now TV content is a much smaller piece of the puzzle as a large content creating community has been fostered. The recent launch of NIN Remix may just be the jumpstart for UGC music. UGC music will become mainstream. The only question is if NIN Remix will be what gets the snowball rolling.

The NIN Remix site is still new and has some rough edges, but the important features are there and the intention seems about as genuine as it gets. The multi-tracks of NIN songs are offered up for free, anyone can upload a remix and the final MP3 is downloadable. The whole site experience is one “page” – which works surprisingly well. Each sort (newest songs, highest rated songs, etc.) are treated as playlists, so upon the completion of one song, you naturally move on to the next. It is a much more seamless experience than the page-view model and acts like an iTunes-in-your-browser design. Like all community-based UGC models, you can rate, comment, see user profiles, etc. This kind of site works very well for the remixability of NIN work but it is definitely not for all bands. Still, the door has been opened and the public is no doubt going to expect ideas along these lines from more and more artists.

It is simply over for the RIAA and the contemporary music industry. They had the chance to adapt like other forms of media did, but chose not to. Now it is frankly too late and the public/artists are beginning to pull the rug from under them. NIN Remix symbolizes a large step in that direction – it may not be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but it is still a significant symbol.

Nine Inch Nails 'Year Zero' Album Available for Listening – Trent Reznor Gets What the RIAA Does Not

P.J. Onori — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:05:54 +0000

Trent is at it again. Just like what was done for With_Teeth, Nine Inch Nails released Year Zero for listening before the April 17th release date. Listen away.

As if the RIAA did not look bad enough as it is, when you have high profile musical artists that does something this progressive, the organization looks even worse. With a very forward-thinking marketing campaign, allowing the public to freely listen to the album before its release, not to mention absolutely amazing music, Trent Reznor is basically showing the rest of the music industry how things should be done. Year Zero has easily been the biggest music-related event on the internet this year – for good reason. I myself have already listened to the album and have pre-ordered the album and I suggest you do too.

New Nine Inch Nails Viral Campaign Proving Media 2.0′s Reach

P.J. Onori — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 07:37:28 +0000

As the Nine Inch Nails viral campaign continues, its brilliance is starting to show. Nevermind the released tracks or the storyline being concocted for this campaign – do not get me wrong, they are both amazing – but that is entirely beside the point of this article.

With a few small websites, a couple flash drives containing MP3 files, and a whole boat-load of creativity, this viral campaign has caught fire – with three articles hitting the front page of Digg and tons of buzz generated elsewhere (online and offline). The Year Zero viral campaign has definitely succeeded and continues to draw attention much longer than the usual “marketing spikes” do. From my view, this is a major score for the media 2.0 corner. With the media/advertising blitz of the Super Bowl still resonating I thought it would be interesting to see how the marketing campaigns of media 1.0′s Goliath compared to the Nine Inch Nails viral project.

Below are Alexa’s traffic results for NIN.com versus four companies that advertised during the Super Bowl:

The NIN viral campaign beats all of them out and seems to have greater staying power than all four of the competitors as well. I am well aware that, to a certain extent, this is comparing apples to oranges. Most of these companies do not rely heavily on their website for success and their ads were offline to begin with. It is asking a lot of an individual to go to a website through a TV ad – no doubt about it. All that being said, I would expect a lot if I spent $2.5 million for 30 seconds or airtime. As can be seen from the chart above, just like those 30 seconds, the public’s attention came and went very quickly. Unlike a 30 second ad, an online presence is always available and can be constantly updated.

I thought it would only be fair to throw a dot-com into the equation:

As for a dot-com versus dot-com comparison, SalesGenie.com spent $3.7 million for their Super Bowl advertisements and obviously got a big spike. However, from the diagram below, that spike did not last too long and it appears as though the NIN campaign could pass it up in the next few days. It really does beg the question if a couple of 30 second spots will continue to make sense versus a creative, sustained and continually evolving bridge between the advertiser and its target audience.

With the net generation watching less TV, will these ridiculously expensive ads finally be seen for what they really are – ridiculous? We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to full-fledged creative online marketing campaigns. I have no illusions that many will be as fun and generous as the NIN campaign, but these sorts of results from a very off-mainstream viral theme for a relatively niche band is pretty amazing. I personally have found this entire sequence of events absolutely fascinating and makes me very excited to see how things will continue into the future.