Do you remember when Radiohead released their latest album online, giving it away for whatever price people saw fit? Well, NIN just did the same, with the difference that unlike Radiohead, you can download their newest album “Ghosts” via BitTorrent, without having to go through a credit-card transaction (even though people could opt for paying nothing, they still had to pay the transaction fee…which I think is perfectly alright, it’s just more hassle than just firing up your preferred torrent-client).
And here’s another difference: while the Radiohead album In Rainbows was a full download, NIN only gives away the first 9 songs of the album for free. But as Mashable reports, you can download a longer version of the album on the NIN website for 5$ or buy the physical album for 10$ or buy limited super-deluxe hyper versions for 70 or 300$. It should be noted that the 5$ download of the complete album is accompanied by a 40 page PDF booklet and a whole lot of artwork. Apart from the mp3s, Radiohead’s download contained nothing at all, not even a cover-image (spawning contests for coverart, like here). And what else should be noted is that 10$ for a whole 2CD-album AND a link for immediate download of the whole album is a fucking steal (shipping and handling is 13$, at least to Vienna, but that’s still not more expensive than I’d normally pay for a physical album).
So here you go. Yet another one of the biggest bands of our days has decided to leverage what power, fame and fortune they have to totally revolutionize how music is distributed. Fantastic!