The best-selling music album of 2008 on Amazon was Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV. This may be a surprise to some because front man Trent Reznor personally uploaded the album to the Pirate Bay and the private music tracker What.cd earlier last year. He also offered a free download from the band's website and licensed it under a Creative Commons license.
It was pretty clear early on that those free releases didn't harm the commercial success of Ghosts I-IV. Fans paid more than 1.6 million dollars for downloads and deluxe edition physical releases of the album in the first week after its release alone. The album also got nominated for a Grammy award just a few weeks ago, and Reznor followed up Ghosts I-IV with another album that got released via the band's own Bittorrent tracker. [P2P Blog]
So giving the music away ultimately led to a huge sales success. That's the Share Economy, applied to the notoriously slow and stupid music industry which, according to Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig, has nothing better to do than criminalise an entire generation of kids.
The video above is a case study talk given at MIDEM by Michael Masnick, who edits the Techdirt Blog and is also President & CEO of Floor64. [via]
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