We have SOLD OUT of the 2500 Limited Edition Packages.My great-uncle is fond of a saying. "It is better to be rich and healthy than to be poor and sick." Seeing this, I was reminded of it. It's not quite as catchy, but it's better to be customer-friendly and a huge success than reviled as corrupt and a failure.
The music and movie industries have been telling us for the last few years that digital restrictions are required in order to save their businesses from destruction. Well, Mr. Reznor has proven them wrong quite dramatically. Before I continue, let me address an obvious objection up front - I realize he's a superstar. However, the spokespeople for the RIAA that support their claims are also superstars: Lars Ulrich is hardly a starving artist laboring in obscurity. I'm not saying everyone can do what he did, only that the people who are already rich in the music industry can continue to be rich without the bullshit that they claim is critical.
The "Limited Edition", for those of you not up on the latest NIN happenings, is a three hundred dollar version of the album, containing a bunch of extras and a signature from Mr. Reznor himself. The full album, in lossless, non-restricted format, costs five dollars. There were 2500 copies of the limited edition.
Let me emphasize for those of you who might not be quite as up on the terminology that "lossless" formats (which NIN is selling for $5 here) are the highest quality format that it is possible to distribute over the internet. Other music producers, out of fear for eating their CD revenues, have mostly refused to provide digital copies of their music of this quality.
Also, to compare pricing: Apple typically charges 99¢ for a DRM-free song: it's not lossless, but it's 256kbps, which is fairly high quality. (I would not believe it if someone told me they could hear the difference, but there is a marginal difference in the perception of value here.) There are 36 songs on "Ghosts". $5 is roughly 14% of $35.64.
So now that I've established that NIN is selling higher quality goods, in a customer-friendly way, for a fraction of the price of the competition, let's do some math:
- march 6, today,
- minus the march 4th (the date that the "ghosts" website became fully operational (according to wikipedia),
- is two days, times
- 2500 copies
- times 300 dollars
- equals SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TWO DAYS.
Coincidentally, it also proves that you don't need any RIAA thugs to help you do this, or "market" your work, assuming people already know who you are. You just need a web server, and a swimming pool big enough to put a million dollars.
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4 comments:
Not a new format, though (except for the losslessness of NIN's album). Fairly similar situation to what Radiohead did a couple months back with In Raimbows. It was a "listen to the album, and pay what you think it's worth afterwards" format, plus a us$300 or so special edition
raiNbows
First of all, it's not two days, it's one day. They sold out yesterday morning.
And for about half that time, the website wasn't working. I compute a flow rate of 1.5 million dollars per day, given an sufficient supply of Trent Reznor signatures. :-)
I've been saying for a long time that a dollar a song is way too much. Every time I've been asked what a fair price is (maybe twice), I've said: 25 cents. This is not based on the marginal cost of song production or what the market would bear or anything like that; it's just what I'm willing to pay for music made by a superstar, given the plenitude of free choices around.
Here Trent is offering 36 songs for $5 which is 13 cents per song.
I put my money where my mouth is and bought my copy.
I read that Trent was considering doing the same thing that Radiohead did with the "pay what you want (even if it's nothing)", but when he did a test marketing thing with an rapper/poet he works with he was "disheartened" to find that most people took the free option.
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