How to make $750,000 overnight! Trent Reznor's a genius!

Ok, so I'm a bit late on this, actually I'M not a bit late on it, just this post is a bit late. I've been wired to my computer over this release for the last 2 weeks. Trent Reznor has done it again, after the digital-only release of the Saul Williams album, "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust", Trent Reznor has come swinging at the forefront of the music industry releasing a new NIN album. Saul's album was released a few months ago with 2 options for the fans, they can either download it for free, or they can download it for $5, which is a higher quality MP3 file. After a few weeks, Saul had sold 28,322 copies for $5. That's $141,610, which is not bad for a donate-able $5 MP3.



I'm not even a NIN fan, but I respect them, and more importantly, I respect what Trent Reznor is currently up-to in the music industry. So with this new NIN album,"ghosts", the fans can purchase it five different ways, they can download it for free (they only receive the first 5 tracks), or pay $5 for a full-length, high-quality MP3 download, or pay $10 for a double-disk set, or pay $75 for a deluxe-edition package (comes with a DVD, Blu-ray, hard cover slipcase, etc), or if you were really early, you could've bought the $300 Ultra-deluxe limited addition package, which is now sold out, but came autographed with a bunch of goodies.

The thing that strikes my attention and interest to this release is because it's stirring up the industry, the labels, the fans, the critics, which I think is great, because it's new to everybody. It's just like when Radiohead freaked everyone out last fall.

However, I think the best part about the release of "ghosts" is that Trent Reznor does a very fair job of releasing this album by leaving multiple options to the fans in the way they'd like to purchase/not-purchase it. Why not? It's 2008, the music industry is still not figured out, and Trent Reznor is (in my opinion) the leader at current innovation to the music industry. I think more artists need to start taking notes from him, especially artists that have left major labels.

Hey Trent, how about you let your fans decide how much your music is worth on the next album by giving them a "Name Your Own Price" option? There is a site that offers it for independent artists already, it's called INDISTR!