Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I - IV

The mighty Nine Inch Nails, probably the only band I have followed continuously since 1990, has just released a new album of instrumental tracks. What makes this album special is it is their first album to be released without the support of a major record label. Trent Reznor is releasing the album himself with a similar model to Radiohead's pay what you want model. Here is the pricing structure:

FREE - You can download the first 9 tracks of this 36 track opus for free.

$5 - You can purchase the entire album digitally as either 360kbs mp3 or FLAC including PDF booklet.

$10 - You get a double cd in a 6 panel digi pak. I'm definitely going to get this one.

$75 - You get a hardcover fabric slipcase containing: 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow.

$300 - All the above and some nicely pressed and presented vinyl versions of the album. But this is limited to 2500 copies and has sold out already.

How does this album sound then. Well, in a nutshell, excellent. It is certainly more experimental than previous NIN album and is all instrumental, which suits me down to the ground as I much prefer music without someone squawking over the top of it. There is over 2 hours of music here yet you can very easily listen to the whole thing all the way through without tiring.

I was lucky at work today in that I just had loads of documents to read, and I managed to do this for most of the day, so I listened to this album twice on my MP3 player :-)

I think the pricing and release strategy for this album is pretty much spot on, I hope Trent Reznor releases the figures for this like he did with the Niggy Tardust album Saul Williams. Naturally NIN will sell about 1000 times more, but it would still be interesting to see how the release goes.

Of course this is all academic. NIN has been a platinum selling alternative band since the late 80's so he could easily sell bucket loads of records. The lesser known independent artist still has to struggle to get heard so this release mechanism isn't much use.

Anyway, stop reading this crap and go and download the first 9 tracks free and check it out.