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Trent Reznor has just released Ghosts, a new 36 track instrumental album. He's licensed it under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, which means we are free to copy, modify and remix it, as long as it's for non commercial use and we credit NIN.

The first 9 tracks are available for free (even officially uploaded to Pirate Bay), all 36 tracks are available as downloads for $5us (in several formats including Flac), or for more you can get various physical media collections (the most expensive includes 2 audio cds, 1 dvd with multitrack editor compatible tracks for remixing, 1 bluray of DTS 96/24 audio and 4 vinyl lps, plus 2 books of artwork).

That's pretty damn good. It could make good music for a non commercial games.
It's good to see another artist joining Moby, Beastie Boys and Spoon (and others) in embracing digital music distribution.

Yay for Trent!

Kojack wrote:The first 9 tracks are available for free (even officially uploaded to Pirate Bay), all 36 tracks are available as downloads for $5us (in several formats including Flac), or for more you can get various physical media collections (the most expensive includes 2 audio cds, 1 dvd with multitrack editor compatible tracks for remixing, 1 bluray of DTS 96/24 audio and 4 vinyl lps, plus 2 books of artwork).

WOW, that's pretty neat!!

It's great musicians start releasing art for free through the web. I mind paying 15-20€ (knowing the band won't get more than 1€) for many music I like but not love, though I don't mind paying 30€ to see them live. Live concerts are the real income of most bands, and releasing their music for free or digital distribution is putting the candy in our mouths.

Coolness

Very nice.

I mind paying 15-20€ (knowing the band won't get more than 1€)

Same as with lots of other retail media - games, movies, etc. IMO, the future of distribution is really via online channels and live performances.

It could make good music for a non commercial games.

Actually when we talking about game soundtracks, then sometimes even for commercial games some bands agree to do it for free, just for the sake of portfolio and extra renown, and that can be quite good too, helps new startups.

Some sales info has been released.
By the end of the first week of distribution, sales were up to $1.6million. $750000 of that was just from the first day sales of the $300 limited edition version (the one with vinyl lps, bluray, dvd, cds).

Including the free 9 track download option, over 780000 transactions were made in the first week.

But Trent is still doing more. He's teamed up with youtube to have a Ghosts film festival. Anyone can make a video to go with the tracks, upload it to youtube, and a panel (including Trent) will put the best ones on the NIN channel.

I think this worked pretty well.

As a reward for how well the Ghosts thing went, Trent has just released another album, "The Slip".

But there won't be any form of commercial release until around july, for now the whole album is available free online, with all tracks under a Creative Commons license again.

The 10 tracks are available as mp3 (86MB), flac (259MB), m4a (263MB) and 24Kbit/96KHz wave (1.2GB) and come with a 14 page pdf doc album liner thingy. The mp3 version is a direct download in a zip, the other 3 options are all torrents.

Unlike the previous 4 cds, these aren't instrumentals, they are actual songs with vocals by Trent.

Go here to grab it:
http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

The RIAA is going to assassinate him....

It's really good too. There are going to be some craphouse freeware games with awesome music popping up soon