Trent Reznor Sells Out Creative Commons Album

See, this is part of the reason Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor is so enduringly popular. Unlike Metallica, he knows what the Hell’s going on.

At first, Reznor considered putting his new album Ghosts I-IV out on a pay-what-you-like basis, a la Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Fortunately, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig convinced Reznor that attribution would add value to his digital media.

It took a while to explain, but Reznor got it big time. Earlier this week, he put the entire album out under a Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, even offering the first nine tracks free. The rest of the album was made available in differently-priced editions, with the luxuriously-packaged Ultra Deluxe Limited Edition available for $300.

In digital media, abundance leads to value. The Internet is a referral economy, where remixing and redistribution generate valuable attribution. Combining those two phenomena generated a rapid windfall for Reznor, who sold out the $300 edition of the album in just three days. Note that people can redistribute and remix all this music for free, with attribution. In fact, they’re required to do so. Reznor himself even made the free tracks available on The Pirate Bay.

“We believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them,” Reznor said.

“We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc.”

None of this would have been possible had Reznor been burdened with a record label. This is quite possibly the biggest success story for Creative Commons yet, and the strongest indictment of the record labels’ outdated business model.

Artificial scarcities and the fiction of “piracy” be damned. What’s really become a Ghost here is the old way of monetizing music. When Lessig runs for Congress, he’ll have an actual rock star on his side.