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NIN CC-Licensed Ghosts Album Tops Amazon 2008 Download Charts

By Hanno Kaiser

This is truly remarkable. NIN’s album

Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon?s MP3 store. Take a moment and think about that. NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon?s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked. The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

We’ve discussed a similar, albeit much less radical experiment by Radiohead in an earlier post.

According to the band, 800,000 transactions generated $1.6 million in sales revenue in the first week of the album’s availability, despite the fact that the 36-song version of the album is widely available on torrent sites.

Full post as published by Antitrust Review on January 05, 2009 (boomark / email).