Grabbing hold of current trends in both music sales/distribution and digital advertising/marketing, Trent Reznor’s band the Nine Inch Nails (disclaimer: I am and always have been a very big fan) have launched their new instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV, online in a variety of both digital and physical formats with prices ranging from free for the 9-track DRM-Free sampler album to $300 for the Ultra deluxe package.
With a nod towards Radiohead’s recent launch of In Rainbows, which they offered online for the price the user felt they wanted to pay and was covered alongside the future of the music business as a whole in great detail in an article by David Byrne for Wired Magazine, Reznor has changed tack slightly by providing a large range of options to suit all pockets.
Free music being what it is recently, with a lot of artists testing the water one way or another, such as Prince with his Daily Mail (gah! must clean mouth out after saying that paper’s name) free CD, there are lots of discussions ongoing as to whether this is a solid new approach or simply something already established artists with a loyal fan base are able to exploit at this time.
What really interests me in this instance is what Reznor has done alongside the variable pricing structure for his latest work – which is providing a whole host of other formats to the usual MP3, as well as material specifically designed to act in a marketing context.
When you download the album (I got the $0 version for now, although I will be getting the full thing on pay day!), you get a couple of folders full of wallpaper, the cover art for the album as a JPG, a PDF document which acts like the insert in a CD (some lovely photography contained within) and, most interesting in some ways for us digital marketing types, a whole host of pre-made banner, button and blog header images.
Reznor is doing something very intelligent and interesting here. Not only is he experimenting with the free music approach, something which in itself will generate a load of PR one way or the other, but he’s giving the music itself away in multi-track formats to encourage people to play with and remix his work (something he did previously on other albums, giving it away in Apple Garage band format at least), and by providing the ready made blog and banner formats, he’s giving people a way to show their loyalty to the band, and in turn generate a viral style effect for the album which he couldn’t possibly hope to achieve on his own or through an agency with a media plan.
By giving away so much stuff, stuff which fans will firstly think is way cool and want to put all over the internet, Reznor’s actually giving the fans control over his marketing campaign, truly putting it right into the hands of the people who know and love the most about the band in the first place.
User generated advertising was a buzz word a short time ago, and perhaps still is in certain bars around Soho on a good night, but handing over the control of the campaign, utilising free media space in highly targetted areas with an applicable audience, is IMHO a master stroke and a perfect example of where marketing is possibly going in terms of control and transparency.
Undoubtedly the freedom NIN and the like are now experiencing in terms of no-label is also extending itself into their thinking for no-agency marketing and no-control PR.
In more ways than just my musical taste alone I have to say right now Trent, I am a big fan.
Howard
