That's the way to do it.

Nine Inch Nails have just released a new album, Ghosts I-IV - a 2-hour, 36-track instrumental album. That's not the interesting part, however - the interesting bit is how it's being distributed.

-

You can, for free, download the first 9 tracks, in high quality MP3 (320kbps). And a 40-page booklet in PDF format.

Or for $5, you can download the entire album, in high quality MP3 (320kbps), or FLAC, or Apple Lossless. And the 40-page booklet, too.

Or for $10, they'll ship you the 2 CD set (to ship next month) and you can download the album, just like the $5 version.

For $75, you can download it, and you get the CDs, but as well as that, you get a data DVD with all the music in wav format, broken into its seperate tracks so you can remix all the songs; and a blu-ray disc containing all the music in an ultra-high quality version with a slideshow on as well. All presented in a nice case. This is for pre-order, shipping May.

Then for $300, you get the package the same as the $75 one, as well as some professional prints of all the artwork from the album, and a four-LP set of the album on vinyl. Each one of these packs is signed by Trent Reznor, frontman of NIN. Only 2500 are available.

-

And there isn't a scrap of DRM to be found on any of these things.

I think this is absolutely fantastic. The money is going direct to the artist, rather than through some greedy middleman record label, there's no DRM in sight, and the download is available in FLAC! 99.9% of digital downloads are in some lossy format, like MP3 or AAC, but FLAC is lossless - 100% of the quality is preserved. The DVD with all the tracks and that Blu-ray disc, too - there's simply no-one else who would offer anything like this.

Thoughts?

I really think this is the way forward. I think plenty of people will cough up the money for the more expensive versions. I know if a band I really liked released different tiered products in this way I'd want to fork out for the most expensive one.

It seems that all 2500 of the $300 versions have now been pre-ordered.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... -free.html

$750,000 in three days, on one product. Not bad. And obviously that version is not going to be the most popular one - to have sold them all in 3 days means he has probably made millions already.