CelticBear’s Musings

UPDATE: Azamien has brought it to my attention that I’m mistaken regarding Trent Reznor appreciating what Radiohead did. (You’ll understand in a moment.) It may have helped form what Trent would later do, (and possibly do it better), but Trent has stated that he thought Radiohead’s thing was a “bait-and-switch.”
♦ Trent Reznor: Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ promotion was ‘insincere’
(Hat tip to Azamien)

Trent Reznor (aka, Nine Inch Nails) has just released the new, full studio release of the latest NIN album (and follow-up to the last studio album, Year Zero), The Slip, for free off the Web!

♦ NIN album, The Slip

It’s available in MP3 as well as ultra-high quality FLAC and Wav formats. He’ll be selling physical copies next month. This move, through the Creative Commons license, is hot on the heels of his release of the 2-disc Ghosts for free for digital copies, and modest prices for various physical forms.

Trent was so impressed by what Radiohead (my 3rd favorite band) did last year by offering their latest album for free (or whatever price you wanted to contribute for it), that when his contract ended and he became a free artists, he decided to do something similar. What probably helped is when his last contractual album, Year Zero, came out, it was leaked on the Internet. Either on his own, or to jerk around his corporate overlords, in response he streamed the album for free on his Web site. Despite both the leak and the free stream, the sales were still quite good! Proof that with the proper respect toward your fans, free offerings can still make you money.

It also helps that now that he’s no longer beholden to a record company, he gets more than less-than $1 per CD sold. So, under a record company, if he sold 100 CD’s in the store, he’d get about $9 as the artist. On his own, he could give away 50 of that 100 and sell the other 50, and after cost still make $250. It just makes sense!
But then you have the question over whether you have to be famous and have a huge, dedicated fan base, like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead, for this to even be possible. Maybe.

In comes author Cory Doctorow. Contributor for blog BoingBoing, former advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and rabid digital rights advocate. This last week his new book came out:

♦ Little Brother
A young adult novel about some innocent teens who are brought in by Homeland Security as terrorist suspects, and are so victimized by the (very real world) domestic terrorism by the government that they seek to thwart the government’s program of abuse-of-liberty-via-false-security through their use of technology. (Also very real-world, and the book provides a how-to in each chapter for some of the methods used in the novel. Instructables Web site is also promoting some counter-surveillance/fake security methods in conjunction with the book.)

Cory started releasing each of his books for free under Creative Commons from the very beginning. He’s now somewhat famous and very well respected as a scifi author. He attributes his success to the fact that he’s offered his work up for free, believing that anyone who downloads a copy and doesn’t buy the book wasn’t going to anyway. It’s not a lost sale. And there are probably a lot of people who downloaded a copy and then bought the book who may never have bought it if not for the free version–gained sales.

One difference in these issues, the music and the books, is the record companies are rabid fighters against all possible threats to their profits, real or imagined. Book publishers are a million times more willing to back the artist. For example, Radiohead’s and Trent’s record labels would never have allowed what Cory’s doing, and in fact, I understand Trent’s went positively insane over his “stunt” of streaming Year Zero. Tor, Cory’s book publisher, which is a corporation and does like to make money, have been completely supportive of Cory’s providing his books for free. And likewise Cory defends them, asking people to buy the book whenever possible and letting people know Tor isn’t a bad guy in all this and has been very forward-thinking and treats him well as an author. As a matter of fact, Tor has since started releasing relatively new popular sellers for free to subscribers of their newsletter. The book company seems to know a little something about customer loyalty, artist loyalty, and marketing and potential sales that the music industry appears to be blind to.

Other publishers have picked up writers such as Scott Sigler, after they put their first books out for free on the Internet, and subsequently have become popular sellers. Sigler’s latest book was made available for free for days before going on sale, only to become one of Amazon’s top book sales. Seems as though the book companies are learning it’s a new world, and to survive, you have to adapt–not try to block the inevitable change from happening.