Not since Pretty Hate Machine have I been so enthusiastic with Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails. Artistically, I find his latest release Ghosts an interesting, meandering, sometimes beautiful and occasionally grooving body of work. But as a writer/new media specialist, what really gets me jacked is the business model Trent used. The first volume of Ghosts (9 tracks) were released free online in various formats, DRM-Free and under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. Fans also had the option to download Ghosts for $5 from the NIN website or on Amazon.
This is where the money part begins and the free ends. For $10 fans can buy the 2CD album, including a link to the digital download. $75 buys the Deluxe Edition Package, which includes the album in a fabric slip-cover case, a DVD with the album in multi-track format, and a Bluray disc with the music accompanied by a slideshow. The $300 ultra-deluxe limited edition (only 2,500 units made available) includes even more NIN stuff.
Behold, dear friends, the freemium business model in full plume. And it can make you a lot of money.
However, there were two flaws that haunted Trent’s otherwise brilliant execution (problems which plagued Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” as well) and it throttled the release’s revenue stream and earning potential. As painful a realisation this must be to these artists, the payoff for both Ghosts and Radiohead’s internet release of “In Rainbows” would’ve been Brink trucks more lucrative if their servers dolled out the files and accepted payment instead of quickly crawling into foetal position. The reality is many eager fans tried to pay Radiohead and NIN for their music (and in a symbolic gesture give the bloated corpse of the traditional music market a boot heel in the ribs) but couldn’t, because the website was felled by the massive demand. We witnessed the same tragic error perpetuated again with Ghosts, as fans attempt to pay via Paypal or some other mechanism and were rejected as if by the house of Mutombo. Whatever the cash intake for Ghosts ends up being (and I’m sure it’ll be amazing), it could’ve and should’ve been much more.
There were also some obvious “cost savings” implemented on behalf of NIN, and it may have hurt the brand. There are no vocals or song titles - it was purely an instrumental release. Ghosts(I) is good, but it’s rarely great, and it’s too short. If people forecast how good volumes II through IV is based on what they heard on Ghosts I, they may not think it’s worth purchasing or downloading at all. My suggestion to Trent (who I know is lurched over on his chair, reading this) is to arrange more listener-accessible tracks in volume one, and the more esoteric stuff on the later volumes - the premier content hardcore fans would pay for anyway.
For those who have yet to hear volumes II through IV (there are 36 tracks in all), dont worry: more promising tracks reveal themselves with repeated listens.
The solutions to the other aforementioned problems are pretty obvious. On the backend, get a bigger, better server, and/or mirror the content on other servers as well. In other situations, use the free peer-to-peer content distribution network called the Coral Cache to mirror web content and leverage the bandwidth of the participating Coral nodes as proxy servers. Better server == better service. It’s as simple as that.
As for the front-end, the website needs to be fully functional and intuitive for the visitor. NIN er, nailed that one. On the other hand, judging from my experience on the site, I wonder if Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” website ever worked at all. Because of that, they missed out on a bigger pot of gold.
[…] As near perfect as NIN’s Ghosts internet release was, there were two flaws that haunted Trent ’s otherwise brilliant execution (problems that plagued Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” as well) and it throttled the release’s revenue stream and earning potential. read more | digg story […]