A few months ago Radiohead made history by releasing their latest album, In Rainbows, on a name-your-price basis. Allowing a fan to download the entire album for as little as, well, nothing if they so desired. Of course, many did, but most genuine fans stumped up real hard cash. As Radiohead don’t have a record label, they got to keep 100% of that money, and because of this Radiohead made more money from the digital release of In Rainbows than from the profits from digital sales of their entire back catalogue.

Of course, the In Rainbows release wasn’t without its problems – your ‘name-your-price’ download only got you middling 160kbps quality MP3s, for example. Audiophiles sneered at such lax quality, and those who wanted physical media had to wait three months for the CD.

Clearly, a certain Trent Reznor had been paying attention to this brave new dawn, and yesterday morning his band, the revered Nine Inch Nails released ‘Ghosts I-IV‘ via a similar digital delivery method.

Like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails are unencumbered by the restraints of a record label and recording contract – both bands have massive followings and it matters very little to either act if their singles don’t chart.

Being the musical giants of their respective genres, they can both pretty much put out whatever they like, and the masses will eat it all up, dissect it, and beg for more. Yes, “Kid A”, I’m talking about you! With this in mind, it’s possible to come to the conclusion that the entirely instrumental, pseudo-ambient ‘Ghosts I-IV’ is nothing more than Reznor noodling away with some friends and recording the results. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. All of which makes it an excellent candidate for some clever internet marketing shenanigans!

For $5 (or £2.52, in real money), you can download the entire 36-track, 4 CD album – without any Digital Rights Management copy protection, in 320kbps MP3, FLAC lossless or AAC lossless formats. This is a giant leap forward for DRM-free digital delivery. Now, if only it’d worked…

The ‘Ghosts’ website goes to great lengths to re-affirm to you that your purchase is a one-time only ticket, one-click, one-download, one-time, no copying, no lending, one-click, that’s it. If you choose the MP3 version, that’s what you’ll get – want the FLAC version? Another $5, please. That’s fair enough, and we wouldn’t want it any other way – but it comes to something when the actual download link that you end up with is a publicly available file on download.store.nin.com.

Of course, it didn’t take very long for people to notice this, and, naturally the resulting links were shared far and wide. Which meant that the digital download site fell over. Which meant that people that paid for the tunes didn’t get them.

I’m trying to work out if this is an intentional move by Reznor – releasing some of his works completely free in a bold move, or if it’s a mere ‘technical glitch’ accidentally revealing the location of the music to all and sundry. Surely if it’s the former it’d be better to make a real point of announcing such a move, but – if it was the latter, surely such a mistake would be ‘cleaned up’ by now, and the files removed or protected in some way? It’s hard to gauge the true intent.

It’s actually tucked away on the ‘Ghosts’ site that the music is actually being offered under a Creative Commons licence, which grants the user the full ability to copy, share, listen and remix the music as they see fit – with the only caveat that any such undertakings are done non-commercially and with all attribution to the original author. Added to that, Nine Inch Nails ‘officially’ distributed the first 9 tracks of the album via notorious Bittorrent site, The Pirate Bay.

If Nine Inch Nails really wanted to release this music freely – why ask fans to pay $5 in the first place? I’m not bemoaning the cost, far from it, I’m just confused as to the motives.

Me, I put down the $5, and tried – in vain – to download legitimately. The failure drove me (and thousands of others) to torrent the music down – which begs the question – why not just do this anyway?

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