Ghosts I-IV

Need a reminder that the Internet has changed the economics of music?

Nine Inch Nails‘ Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV, which was released as a free download, is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Despite the fact that you could download Ghosts legally from file-sharing networks, and despite the fact that you could copy the album and share it with your friends, people, in droves, purchased the release at Amazon. 

I’ll be very surprised if more artists don’t try to reproduce NIN’s success in 2009. 

What do you think this means for artists that don’t have the high profile of Trent Reznor and NIN?

via CC

This week, the Grammy Awards nominations were announced - and, for the first time, a Creative Commons-licensed track and album are on the list.  Nine Inch Nails’ 34 Ghosts IV is nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, while the album that track appears on, Ghosts I-IV, is up for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package.

Creative Commons licenses are designed to protect your rights to your music, while allowing people copy and share it. 

Creative Commons’ Eric Steuer notes:

This year, NIN released both Ghosts I-IV and a second album, The Slip, under a CC BY-NC-SA license. Both albums were downloaded for free and shared legally millions of times by fans under the terms of this license. At the same time, NIN found great financial success in selling cool, well-crafted, limited edition physical editions of both sets. Back in March, Wiredsaid the band made $1.6 million on Ghosts I-IV in its first week of release alone.

Additionally, Radiohead’s song “House of Cards” is up for several Grammys, including Best Short Form Music Video. The video’s animation data was released under a CC BY-NC-SA license earlier this year (see previous post).

Congratulations to Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead for the nominations. Also, congratulations to all of the other artists whose work was nominated for Grammys this year, including Brian Eno, Diplo, Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo (AKA Gnarls Barkley), My Morning Jacket, Gilberto Gil, Peter Gabriel, Thievery Corporation, and Cornelius – all of whom have used Creative Commons licenses and/or have supported CC over the years.

Musicians like NIN are using Creative Commons licensing, and giving away their music, to actually gain more control of their careers.

It remains to be seen whether unknown artists will be able to create new careers at the scale of groups like Nine Inch Nails, though.

This video, by Matthew Davidson (stretta) is for NIN’s Ghosts 13:

When Nine Inch Nails announced their Ghosts Film Festival – an invitation for fans to submit videos from the new album, I was interested enough to write it down in my creative to do list, and consigned myself to forgetting about it or missing the deadline. But, Ghosts 13 spoke to me. I saw symmetric neon tubes that drew themselves in time to the melody, slowly falling into the distance. It was just a matter of finding the time to realize it. Vimeo allows HD (1280×820), so, by all means, don’t view this tiny version embedded in the blog, click on the vimeo logo. But, the original full res version is 1920×1080.

This is what makes Creative Commons music licensing so interesting. NIN released their music free for anyone to share, encouraging people to remix it and use it creatively. The result is more remixes and more music videos than they ever could afford to pay to have done!

Not only is the deluxe edition of NIN Ghosts I-IV one of the most beautiful box sets ever, they’ve thrown in some extra music.

The deluxe edition was limited to 2,500 copies ,which sold out within 36 hours at $300 each. It includes two CDs, a data DVD with multi-tracks for remixing, a 24 bit/96 kHz Blu-ray disc, four 180-gram vinyl records, a 48-page book of photographs and two Giclee prints in high-quality luxurious packaging numbered and signed by Trent Reznor.

Here are links, via Sendspace, to download the extra tracks:

• Ghosts 37 [mp3]
  
• Ghosts 38 [mp3]

via califaudio

Nine Inch Nails are on a roll. They are releasing a new song, Discipline, today via their site. It’s a free download, and after all the Ghosts I-IV hype, it’s destined to get some significant airplay.

Preview it above, while you can, and check their site for the download later today.