We all know about Quora which is not quite conversational, but it certainly does create discussions. The Next Web recently featured Treepoll and Teztify — both of which do not quite achieve what I am hoping for, but are interesting nonetheless. I am encouraged however that all three of the startups mentioned are focusing on what happens after someone broadcasts an idea or piece of content to a group of people.

I am often weary of a startup’s elevator pitch, but I find the difference in language describing startups founded around 2005-2006 to some of those in 2010-2011 interesting.

Take, for instance Twitter…

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting.

…and from Treepoll…

Our goal is to forever improve the way people share their thoughts and opinions by making it not only fun but also enriching!

From Reddit…

Reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web. Users like you provide all of the content and decide, through voting, what’s good and what’s junk.

…and from Teztify.

Where people come to discuss, debate and share their opinions on the latest news headlines, personal experiences and anything else you can think of.

Yes, this is just language — the proof will be in the pudding. However, I like the fact that people are even mentioning the concept of two-way conversations and collaboration.

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.