Amazon's Best Selling MP3 Album For 2008 Was Available Legally For Free

from the give-people-a-reason-to-buy dept

As some of you may know, in a week and a half I'm giving a presentation at the music industry MidemNet conference, focusing on how Trent Reznor's various business model experiments highlight the future of the music industry. I'll be putting the final touches on my presentation this week, and it's great to find one additional data point: the top selling MP3 download on Amazon last year was Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts I-IV album, which you probably know Reznor put under a pretty open Creative Commons license (and even gave away a bunch of the tracks himself). In other words, you could go on pretty much any file sharing system out there and legally download the music for personal use... and yet it was still the top selling downloadable album (this is on top of all the money earned by Reznor's other business models associated with this album). Certainly puts a nice little cherry on top of the theme of my presentation.

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