Trent Reznor “Disheartened” At Experiment
After Radiohead offered a name-your-own-price download of their latest album, In Rainbows, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame thought he would give it a try as a producer for hip-hop artist Saul Williams.
But Reznor was not satisifed with the results. Of the 154,449 people that downloaded the album, only 18.3% of chose to pay the $5 one needed to pay to get the album in their choice of 192bps, 320bps, and FLAC (Radiohead only offered theirs in 160bps).
A little math shows that fans paid about $140,000 so far for the album. Reznor, in a statement from his website, said, “I’m not sure what I was expecting but that percentage - primarily from fans - seems disheartening.”
I’ll be the first to say that I’ve never heard of Saul Williams and never would have heard of him had he released his album like every other artist. The point of this experiment, as pointed out by Mike Masnick at Techdirt, is not to making money from the downloads themselves but to use it as part of a larger strategy for promoting other possibilities for making money. For instance, Radiohead, realizing the fervent support of their fans, offered a boxed set for In Rainbows that many fans (including one of my best friends) shelled out over $80 for.
Reznor himself admitted that this experiment put Saul Williams’ music in a lot more people’s hands than a normal record release would have. When Williams tours next, the added buzz he received may make up for the lower receipts from the album sales. Plus there’s no label to skim off the profits.
Reznor may be dishearted, but it’s too early to tell whether or not this experiment worked for Saul Williams.
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