Hey, did you know that Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV was the top-selling digital album on Amazon MP3 last year? You might if you read the music press recently, as people are wont to hail and huzzah Trent Reznor for even so much as taking a Webcam photo of himself these days. Much is being made of the fact that Ghosts, which sold for $5 via Amazon’s online shop, was available for free digitally from Reznor’s Web site yet still topped a retailer’s charts; so much, in fact, that people are concluding that making something free is a path—if not the path—to profitability. Which is a false conclusion for a whole mess of reasons, including, as LostTurntable reminds us in the comments to this very post, the fact that all 36 tracks of the album were never available for “free” in the first place.
Yes,only the first nine tracks of the 36-track album were free when it initially came out; the $5 download price was the same on nin.com and Amazon. So this Reznorian triumph is even less of a big deal than initially thought!
Never mind that “No. 1 on the Amazon MP3 store in 2008″ is a lovely little statistic to throw out in a late-night TV ad, but what does it really mean? Amazon’s lack of hard numbers is pretty telling here—I can tout Never Shout Never’s “Yippee” being No. 1 on this week’s SoundScan singles chart without telling you that if someone else had sold 918 copies, they’d have beaten “Yippee” by a nose—and the fact of the matter is that no matter what Amazon sold, the total’s going to be dwarfed by the Reznor-hawked first-week total of 781,917 “transactions.” There was also the matter of Nine Inch Nails’ site being slammed when Ghosts was released, thus making the Amazon MP3 alternative attractive to the impatient.
Just as important here is the idea of the casual fan, the fan who may not be as plugged in to the Nine Inch Nails Internet universe and thus not aware of, say, all those HD torrents of concert footage released earlier this week. Those of you who lived through the ’90s may remember that Nine Inch Nails was a pretty big band at the time! It’s not much of a stretch to think that there are people out there, even in our hyperconnected hypertechnological age, who don’t live and breathe online and who, thus, might have been surprised when they came across a new release by a band they liked while browsing Amazon for a deal on Super Mario Galaxy.
It’s important to remember that the lack of, or maybe I should say lack of mainstream cultural placement of, promotion given to new releases is constructing a huge blind spot where recently issued product almost doesn’t exist for people outside of the superfan/Internet bubble. Over the past few weeks I’ve had friends express surprise when I mentioned new releases by the likes of AC/DC and Taylor Swift. The AC/DC ignorance I’m writing off because the person in question lives in the Wal-Mart-free backwater of New York City, but Taylor Swift?! Sure, this shouldn’t be all that shocking given free-falling sales numbers and the decimated state of music retail, but it’s a very real problem that hasn’t been addressed during the great roll-up of every piece of inventory into one dusty Wal-Mart aisle. And Reznor’s ability to keep the interest of those casual fans who liked him back when is probably more attributable to his album’s (relative) retail success than any server-crippling distribution schemes.
The Internet keeps putting me in a bad mood [Google Blog Search]
(NB: This post was revised after LostTurntable pointed out the very germane fact regarding Ghosts‘ actual price. I’m a dope for not reading my own damn archives more closely. Get the Dear Abby Wet Noodle out!)
@Lucas Jensen: It totally stands. Wasn’t there already an article on this site (I think relating to Amazon’s insane $1.99 album deals) pointing out that a number one position wasn’t enough to move the dial on any sales chart?
I think that what Trent is/has been doing is amazing (his actual forum post about the “leaked” video is hilarious), but it’s not 1994. He’s doing very well for himself, and he’s making his fans very happy, but he’s not a major sales force anymore. Maybe, in this age, accomplishing #1 and #2 is more than enough.
I wonder if Jeff Miers is reading this and taking notes. “Forget Vampire Weekend, Nine Inch Nails is going to be HUGE in 2009!”
Actually, if any of you understood the details of the original Creative Commons article that started all of this, you’d realize that technically, the entire album IS completely free. Sure, only the first part was offered as a free download from NIN’s website, but the *entire* release was licensed under creative commons, which means that it was free to do whatever you want with non-commercially. So, if someone offered it on their blog or sent it to all their friends, or if you downloaded it off a P2P site, that was actually a perfectly legitimate way of getting the entire record. And THAT was supposed to be the headline - that giving your music a creative commons license didn’t cannibalize sales - not that “free” is the new way of distributing music. NIN succeeded with Ghosts not by giving the record away, but by offering their fans a number of really nice paid physical options in addition to the free distribution and the cheap download. So, I’m not even sure what this article’s little rant is even about.
@demonbaby: Well, clearly everyone is misunderstanding everybody. But I think my initial point about Amazon MP3 right now being a blip on the radar in the grand scheme of things, and the fact that at this point in time reaching No. 1 on that store’s year-end chart is the Internet equivalent of Citizen Dick being big in Eastern Europe, stands.
@demonbaby: And again, I think Nine Inch Nails is a special case here. They have a much bigger sandbox to play in than any of the other aspiring bands who CC is trying to reel in, thanks to the money they made from the old system. Trying to compare their efforts to anyone else is a bit ludicrous, no?
@Maura Johnston: Point. And I think the online blog world has copy-pasted an headline they didn’t exactly understand and are mislabeling the NIN release as “free,” when it’s a tad more complicated than that.
Another follow-up to your point is that Billboard charts don’t mean dick anymore either, and someone ought to be collecting ALL the numbers - physical sales, digital sales, illegal downloads, blog downloads, etc - and put together charts that are actually relevant in 2009, both from a sales perspective and from an awareness/popularity perspective.
@demonbaby: I would love that, honestly. If I had the resources to do so I would. There are really way too many charts out there and it’s causing massive data smog [tm] and opening way too many doors for people to misleadingly pimp their own interests.
@Maura Johnston: And yes, I agree that there is no evidence that NIN’s methods would work for smaller bands, and I’m tired of seeing that as well. I suppose more important and more elusive is that NIN sees the internet for what it is: an open-source environment where the record industry method of trying to protect everything doesn’t work, but if you find a balance between embracing the openness of the internet and also finding ways to get money back from it, it’s still possible to succeed, at least to some extent. I guess the idea behind it is a more important lesson for other bands than the specific methods.
@demonbaby: But I mean… well, OK. Haha, I was actually going to do a post on this earlier this week, but time ran away from me. (I still might!) What elements would need to be in this chart for it to be truly comprehensive?
For albums, I can see:
- Sales
- Torrent traffic
- ZShare/Rapidshare/Sendspace/etc. traffic
- ?
But then you also have the murky areas of people just swapping stuff with their friends via GMail or AIM or their personal Web sites.
Songs might be a bit easier to track, if only because blog posts (not just on music-centric blogs, either) could be an imperfect equivalent for airplay.
One of my favourite facts this year was that Kaiser Chiefs topped the UK Albums Vinyl chart with just 82 copies! And yet people keep saying vinyl sales are up by huge percentages?!
[drownedinsound.com]
this year? i meant last year… whoops!
Sorry, your ramble-y rant doesn’t make sense. I too am shocked by Ghosts I-IV being #1. Even as a hardcore NIN fan, I’m am convinced there’s something wrong; some numbers misinterpreted… but I think I missed the point on this post.
@madcowdzz: what i’m trying to say is this: saying something is ‘number one’ on a chart without putting that chart in context is lazy, and conclusions shouldn’t be drawn without statistics. at this point, amazon mp3 isn’t really a retail powerhouse, so it probably didn’t take many sales for this particular chart to be topped, you know? i could say that i’m the number one music blogger in my apartment right now, but ultimately that means nothing except on a pr scale.
@Maura Johnston: i mean, you see this kind of bullshit all the time in press releases. people need to be smarter about how they read what’s shoveled out to them. witness:
[www.hypebot.com]
without any concrete numbers about vote totals, this item could just as easily be retitled ‘fancorps proves how little effort is needed to move the needle in online polls.’
Of course the most pathetically wrong aspect of all of this is that Ghosts I-IV was never offered for free, only the first part was.
@LostTurntable: Ugh! I forgot about that part.
Dear Maura-
Did you bother to look where the press release came from? Your over-eagerness to present NIN in a sour light may have cause you to miss the source.
Looks to me like it came from either Amazon or Creative Commons, more likely the latter. I can tell you for sure it didn’t come from NIN’s PR.
Of course the Amazon charts don’t mean a thing, just as Soundscan or Billboard or anything else in this era.
In the words of the great Fred Durst, “lay off the Hatorade, lady.”
@allabout: I’m not taking Nine Inch Nails to task, love. I’m taking lazy writers to task. Did I say anywhere that Nine Inch Nails put out this press release? No.
(Haha, the Trent fans get so sensitive! It’s kind of funny really.)
@allabout: btw regarding the spelling of your durstian quote:
12.24:05 maura johnston: is it spelled haterade or hatorade?
12.24:11 maura johnston: you are my durst expert
12.24:19 Anthony Miccio: lolll
12.24:31 Anthony Miccio: you can get away with either, but I’d go “hatorade”
just fyi! i like the ‘e’ spelling better myself.
@LostTurntable: Is that pathetically wrong?
@allabout: Are you really saying that in 2009 about Fred Durst or haterade? And do Soundscan charts really not mean a thing? They’re fairly accurate in tracking sales and doing well on those charts means, well, you’re selling stuff. Am I missing something here? I think Maura’s points stand.
@Lucas Jensen: Oh yeah, it is. Because people are saying “The power of Trent made people pay for something that was free!” When that ain’t the case. Even RS got in on the act:
[www.rollingstone.com]
@Maura Johnston: It would be worse if you *couldn’t* say you were the number one music blogger in your apartment.