Grateful dead and associated as well as like minded artists have been...more or less...giving their music away for a couple generations now. The Dead taping section has always been packed. And tape trading boards exist all over the world.

In the RIAA model, the artist makes a pittance off of the sale of a CD. They get a nifty signing bonus, get locked into a contract, loose all distribution rights and sometimes ownership of their creative product and then a few pennies for each CD sold.

The Dead made hundreds of millions of dollars TOURING. THAT is the money maker.

The free/cheap online download distribution model DOES work, you just need a good product that appeals to a wide base and the music will sell itself.

This model, however, doesn't work for the Hollywood formula type, ala Britney/J'lo blah blah booooooring, that's because the music isn't really the product, the music is a the hook, the product is the stage presence/dance moves and fan gear sales.

The download distro model works, when the music is good, unique and appeals to people. It's been proven to work for a couple of generations now. Where have the rest of you been...(oh, never mind, prolly at the Britney dance extravaganza...booooring!)

Regarding this part of the article:

Well, yeah -- more people are listening to him. On the other hand, though, "is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage -- primarily from fans -- seems disheartening."

Reznor's reasoning is a bit off here. Actually, less than one in five feel that the increase in fidelity is worth $5. There are probably a lot of people who like the album and are perfectly happy with the lower-fidelity, free version of the album. I'm not even sure most listeners understand what the difference in compression rates mean. And not all music lovers are audiophiles.

But I would hope that any reasonable person who liked the album, even if they didn't care about the fidelity, would have contributed $5 to the artist.

I applaud Trent Reznor's efforts on this. It's really refreshing to read about an artist and business person who is earnestly working on solving the problems and exploiting the possibilities that artists deal with in these times.

The commenter who wrote about buying the cow is completely missing the point. The reality is that nowadays, with P2P, the milk is already free. Restricting access, offering lower-quality downloads, etc, are not solutions when the smart consumer can always turn to the P2P networks (which don't seem to be going anywhere) and get high quality versions of whatever they want.

Most of the discussion in this issue seems to be just fighting about whether downloading is the best thing since sliced bread or whether people who engage in downloading are thieves and parasites who deserve to rot in hell. Neither of these attitudes are productive, and neither will solve the problem. I think the future of the music and entertainment business will belong to those who figure out how to make money with free content.

Of course, touring, merchandising, and licensing are all still good sources of revenue, and all are helped by an artist being widely heard. Various types of sponsorship and patronage and pre-ordering (for example, the album doesn't come out until some threshold is reached) are also interesting possibilities. I definitely hope that people like Trent Reznor and Radiohead continue to explore the possibilities.

Once upon a time it would have been a dream come true to be able to distribute music to millions with zero overhead. Certainly somebody has the brains to put the resources of P2P to work for them.

cause, that's not innovative, we can do that already. the radiohead is the good idea, to complain about the success and compare it to the uncompilable moderately ridiculous, saul's last album had no symbiotic free counterpart (double positive but cool anyway) essentially i hope the one smart thing our man trent (pink floyd) reznor did was NOT spend money on advertising outside of mentioning the situation on his blog. I love both artists, love their contributions to culture, i've listened to saul in the rain at battery park and since coded language, and nin since someone asked me what pretty hate machine was at the record store i worked i said, "heavy metal depeche mode" in 1990. So i'm no me come lately, i'm also a serial recontextualizer, so, yea, next time, do what radiohead did. otherwise look at it as a promotional tool, that's it.

I wish I could sell 20000 copies of my CD. To my far-from-platinum self, 20000 copies is a success.

One of the ways that this could work for him is in the long run, though. I have never listened to anything by Trent Reznor - I'm completely unfamiliar with his music. If I go to a music store, I won't buy his CD - I have no idea what it would sound like or whether or not I'd like it. But I might download a free one - if I like it, I might very well pay for the next one. What he's doing here is expanding his fan base - the fact that 100,000-some people now have his music is tremendous, I think.

So I wouldn't ask the question of whether or not it works at this point; I'd ask it a few years from now. The question is how many downloads he'll get on his next CD, and how many people will pay for it. And then, the next one, and then, the one after that.

There may be a false assumption here. Just because someone downloaded the album doesn't mean that it's on their iPod. My shelves are littered with CDs that I never listen to because the music disappointed me after I plunked $17 down on the counter for it. If I saw a Saul Williams album in the music store I'd probably pass on it, as I've never heard of him. With this new model I can try before I buy and wouldn't hesitate to download the album. That doesn't mean I'll like it, and if I don't I shouldn't have to pay for it. Because of this one cannot conclude that because 126,127 downloaders didn't pay the experiment was a failure.