Nine Inch Nails goes Creative Commons remix-friendly with new album

Nine Inch Nails have released their new album, Ghosts I-IV, as a free download under a remix-friendly Creative Commons license. The band is selling a selection of collectible, high-margin media with the music on it, and will presumably tour and sell tickets to people who got turned on by the freely copyable music.

Q: Is Ghosts I-IV available elsewhere?
A: You can also purchase the download from Amazon's MP3 store right now. The deluxe versions are available for pre-order from Artist in Residence (A+R) as well. Check out their other work.
The same 2xCD you can purchase here and a $39 4x vinyl edition (on 130 gram vinyl in a double gatefold package) will be available at retail in North America (April 8), Australia (April 5), the UK (April 8), Japan (April 5), and most European territories (April 8).
Q: Is the musical content of the CD versions any different from the downloads available here?
A: No, the CD versions contain the exact same 36 tracks as the full download.
Other information:
Ghosts I-IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

Link (Thanks, Hunter, and everyone else who suggested this!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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William Joseph Dunn

It took awhile for me to get through and order the CD, but it eventually worked. I like the different payment and format options Reznor is offering for this album. I think this is a step in the right direction for how artists reach their fans directly and I hope it does well for NIN.
adam hellbound

Just because it’s CC licensed doesn’t mean the licenser has to make the product available for free. You can certainly FIND it for free (he addresses this in the readme) and not be prosecuted for it, but he doesn’t have to make it easy for you.

From the readme:

“Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Undoubtedly you’ll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you’re interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.”
Brian Damage

I think Kurt (#6) is right, that a CC license means you may use the content privately for free at the very least, and you can make derivative works for profit at most.

Regardless, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even if the digital download is only $5. This very much reminds me of the disingenuous offer to download the worstselling PC game Left Behind: Eternal Forces for free* (it’s free after a “$5 digital convenience fee”).
http://www.leftbehindgames.com/free/

Come on, Trent. You’re so close. You captivated me in that bootleg concert video where you encouraged your fans to pirate your music. You teased me by releasing several songs and their isolated samples with CC licenses. Give the whole thing away for free in FLAC and graciously and optionally accept any pittance your fans are willing to give you.

$5 is a reasonable offer from the record exec suits. Only free is acceptable from Trent himself. $5 is a small enough asking price that it makes Trent sound like he’s unsure of his own rebellion.

Your model’s dead! And no one cares! If there is a Torrent I’ll see you there!
Silva

I’ll be buying the 2CD version later this month. Reznor is awesome, and one of the few people that holds understanding of the market (his market, at least), as well as HUGE respect for his fanbase, even if most of them are “filthy pirates” as he says :P
Irene Delse

You gotta love it when a group uses this for an official release:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4059158/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_Ghosts_I_(2008)
MrScience

Um… yeah Brian (#10). They *did* release it onto bit torrent. I guess we’ll see you there.

http://www.thedailyswarm.com/headlines/nine-inch-nails-go-online-new-ighosts-i-ivi-album/

And as far as your other commentary… If you’re downloading the uncompressed originals directly from their site, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect them to try to cover their costs. $5 for two hours of uncompressed content? On a server farm that’s going to be hammered for weeks? Still a good deal, IMHO.
Al Billings

There is no mixed message here. Trent has been pretty clear, if you actually look at interviews he’s done recently, about wanting to be able to make a living without screwing over his fans. The only confusion here is yours.
Al Billings

Oh, and I paid the $5 for it and then when the site problems locked me out of downloading my 320-bitrate content (too many downloads now), I got it from bittorrent. In any case, I gave Trent his requested fee so I don’t feel bad about getting it off of his site.
Bonnie

So glad that Trent and Co. decided to do this. I had a feeling after all the drama they had on the last tour with their label that Reznor would do this.

Here’s hoping more artists follow suit!
vaporlock

#10 “it leaves a bad taste in my mouth”

Dude it’s free unless you want the whole 4 albums which cost $5. This is about as fair as it is ever going to get. Trent is way ahead of the curve as always, I hope the music industry takes note. If everyone supports digital freedom they should lay down $5 just to support the idea (even if the album isn’t your cup of tea).
NikFromNYC

So does NIN get any money when some kid mixes this with the Beatles? And that is the real question in the age of remix-ability. Do the Beatles get any money? Does the kid?

What else to we voluntarily pay for that we can get for free? Subliminal advertising wont really pay the bills, despite the “Buy Coke!” embedded in every track (actually, “Buy Cocaine!”). Certain bits of shareware (about 10% that we use a lot and get sick of chasing bug fixes of). I bought an authentic NIN t-shirt. My name being NIK I want to screenprint an NIK version, ha ha, but just for myself. Water? Like a utility that is almost free? I do not own a subscription to cable TV, but I am up-to-date on the Terminator series, so that doesn’t count since the advertisements are absent.

We pay for physical objects that we cannot make ourselves. An iron-on inkjet version of my NIN t-shirt would look like crap after two washes, nor (even though I already have the backwards ‘K’ graphics for my own NIK t-shirt have I ever gotten around to using my real screen printer to run of one or two durable shirts).

The answer is human skin lamp shades. They must develop laboratory clones lamp shades from the skin of various celebrities. Alas, DNA is even easier to copy than music. Bad idea.

Perfume made from the actual sweat of celebrities!!! That cannot currently be made in a simple lab.

Sperm samples? But no matter how cool Mr. Rezner is, I don’t want him to cuckold me, despite the reassurance that I was merely the thousandth husband to have that done to.

Hair! You can’t grow hair in a lab. It’s simple to authenticate. Sell toenails and hair. Galileo’s middle finger is in a museum, pointing towards the Vatican. Probably worth ten million on Ebay.

Real casts of erect sex toys wont work, since rock stars are compensating for a lack of such things. Hey, why didn’t the Greeks ever put utilitarian instead of flaccid examples of rock hard anatomy, like the Roman’s of Pompei always did?

Making a copy of a Hummer (but heavier and with a bigger motor and a real winch and positive-tracking drive) isn’t “stealing” in the moral sense. It’s like an everlasting patent for a chair with four legs. Even then, if not for profit, you are indeed allowed to build one for your own use, exactly copying the design of any four legged chair you favor.

Oh, I hate to think it, but governmental *taxes* are one solution, but re-distributed to who? Corruption alert. Bad idea.

What about a pill you take and you hear a full “audiophonic” 3D sound of a song? So you buy a bottle of songs. Sorry, being a vampire, I sometimes forget mortality issues vs. modern day solutions.

Do we *want* to reward artists with MILLIONS of dollars just because they earn millions of listeners in an age in which a million PERFECT copies of their work costs them NOTHING to create, and perfect recordings are a couple grand of computer equipment (along with one grand for good microphones)? Maybe not.

Yet do we then want to give our innate (likely evolved) desire to exist in a word populated by about 100-at-a-time “celebrities”? We are evolved monkeys. Naked. Upright walking. Upright citizens, too.

But so too is there a backlash that as CD manufacturing became dirt cheap, CD prices stayed at $14, so for the one hit song among the filler (hello Prince!), we had to pay $14 for that one song. Now this same industry that screwed over both Prince and their customers is suing the hell out of welfare mom’s who wouldn’t be able to afford a full Prince collection in the first place.

I’m not surprised that NIN along with Prince are the bands who are grasping for a new business model and that Britney is cutting her hair off.
Kurt

I have no problem with charging NiN charging $5 for a convenient download, even if the content is freely distributable, just as I have no problem with folks selling Linux distributions. I’m sure other people will redistribute ii-iv, since they are CC licensed.
JB NicholsonOwens

#6: No, not all CC licenses allow for verbatim non-commercial distribution. In fact this confusion is so common it’s why Richard Stallman objects to Creative Commons. He notes that the licenses say such different things one must be clear about which CC license one refers to in order to speak in a meaningful way.

What you’re saying used to be true; there used to be a common baseline of verbatim non-commercial distribution allowed across all CC licenses. But CC later published some licenses (the 3rd world license where people in the first world have considerably fewer freedoms than others, and the sampling license which only allows copying and making derivative works from a snippet of the licensed work; http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/7520 has more on the retiring of these licenses) which don’t allow for verbatim non-commercial distribution. Hence one can no longer assume this freedom when one mentions “CC license”.

Sure, these licenses aren’t the ones chosen for this work and these licenses have been retired from the current set of CC licenses, but the damage has already been done in a sense: once one of the more restrictive licenses is published you can’t be sure if some CC-covered work isn’t using it.

I hope CC will choose to stand firm for a common baseline of freedom for any copyrighted work licensed under a CC license that includes at least non-commercial verbatim distribution and transcoding so we can make works in non-free codecs available in free codecs that don’t alter the underlying work such as transcoding a VQF audio file into a FLAC.
NikFromNYC

I see, this is the five-minute “hype” model of making money. This free Vol. I album sucks. Guess what “Ghosts” means? There are NO LYRICS about animal f*cking. Why? Because there are no lyrics at ALL; that’s their “new direction”. It’s mildly edgy elevator music, like a goth rock version of Moby. And I’m supposed to fork over $5 (+) to hear another 4 albums worth of this junk? Yeah, as ambient music (and indeed I own ‘Music for Airports’ by Eno), it’s not cutting edge. Instead download ‘Ministry’ or ‘Thrill Kill Kult’ or especially ‘Cabaret Voltaire’, ‘Arcane Device’ and last but best ‘Skinny Puppy’ or (rather obscure) ‘Stereotaxic Device’, and even dabble in some work by ‘Throbbing Gristle’.

Re-mix this with the Beatles or Eminem? It will be like your pink t-shirt staining your white socks.
mikelite

the site is getting hammered and dropping connections. I’ve already tried to download it twice and both times I’ve been kicked out after a few minutes. Now I’m locked out and waiting to hear back from NIN customer service. I wonder if Trent himself is answering support emails…
Brian Damage

I love NIN for making this happen, but I’m confused – if the whole album is CC-licensed why do I need to pay to listen to the whole thing? What are the terms of the CC license?
Phart

Call me crazy, but I always liked Trent’s instrumental stuff best. His music and production has always been top-notch but, at least lately, his lyrics have veered towards the “my heart is black/trapped in a sack” sort of nonsense. So I’m pumped for this. $1.75/album I can live with.

Incidentally, is it me or is BoingBoing the only site where you can respond to a post about a new album and worry about being off-topic by talking about the music?
EdT.

Yeah, the site is definitely getting hammered, haven’t been able to download it myself either. I guess I’ll wait until tomorrow… :-( :-(

I don’t know what the CC terms are, but only the first nine tracks are available for free download. To get the full 36 tracks, you need to pay (only $5 for the download). So this is still very much an awesome thing.

Trent has always been ‘user friendly’. If you recall he made these tracks downloadable into garageband.

NIN is teh awesome!!1!
Ian70

Having too many fans accessing your material is a good problem to have. Hopefully they will switch to a torrent-based system to disperse the load from their servers.

Much approval to Trent for figuring out that CC helps promote music to fans. I look forward to the surround-sound and fan-remixed versions of the album which will surely surface in time.

Lastly, remember that not all CC licenses are created equal: there are many flavours of CC. Just saying “CC-licensed” doesn’t necessarily mean that you can listen to it for free.
Kyle Armbruster

NikFromNYC, is it just me or do you not really make much sense? I’ve only seen your comments since today, but I’ve already learned to skip over them, because my day is crazy enough as it is.

I’m waiting for the servers to catch up. Got kicked just after starting the DL of the Apple Lossless file, and I have the CDs coming as well.

I would love the tracks for remixing, but $75 is more than I want to pay, even as much as I love NIN.

I also bought the Saul Williams album. I read that Trent was bummed about the response to that and worried that he’d been wrong about people. Way more people pirated it than bought it, you see. But the reason for that, I think, is that Williams was basically an unknown. Who wants to spend money on someone they’ve never heard? So what do you do? You pirate it and see what you think. And when you do that with Saul Williams, you hear a terrible pile of nonsense crap that can’t decided if it’s a joke or serious.

So it’s not the model that failed; it’s the fact that Niggy Tardust is a terrible, terrible album. I think Ghosts is going to make Trent a mint, and good on him!
Antinous

Kyle,

Nik’s comments are like an autostereogram. If you stare at them looking for meaning, they’re nonsense. When you stop focusing on the parts and go slightly cross-eyed, the picture appears.
harrisonlong

I think this is a great idea! I purchased the $10 CD version, but had to get onto bittorrent to download the album (the mp3 version is already seeded and moving right along).
I wanted to purchase the deluxe set with the slipcase and blu-ray disk, but I though the price outstripped the content. I definitely would have bought it if it had included a 5.1 mix.
I think Trent’s got the right formula this time. The incremental options and abbreviated “free” release should lead to great success than the Saul Williams album. Hopefully he’ll share sales data this time, as well.
Kurt

Just saying “CC-licensed” doesn’t necessarily mean that you can listen to it for free.

Actually, I think it does. Yes, there are several CC licenses. But all of them allow for non-commercial free redistribution. Hence the “commons” part of Creative Commons.
RadioGuy

This totally made my day!

The site is pretty sluggish right now, but your Friendly Neighbourhood Torrent Site is a functional workaround. Then you can swing back later in the week (when the bandwidth issues will hopefully be ironed out) and drop some cash, if that’s your goal.

Damn, that deluxe set looks appealing….
Brian Damage

@#13
Thanks for the tip! I do agree that a $5 convenience fee is reasonable here, and I can understand why they’d want to minimize advertising the free alternative.

@#15
It leaves a bad taste in my mouth because Trent is giving mixed messages about whether he wants to sell or give away his music. Maybe this is because he wants to do both, and I have no problem with that, but he should say so conclusively.
Al Billings

Kyle,

The Saul Williams album is great. I don’t know what you listened to but it obviously wasn’t the same album that I heard (and that Trent loved…).
KurtMac

From the Torrent:

Undoubtedly you\\\’ll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you\\\’re interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5.

Its refreshing to see them so open and understanding of the technology and community, instead of hiding under their desks in denial like most other big-name media and entertainment. Just for that, I think I’ll plop down $10 for the CD version.