Free music tops sales

2009-01-06 16:06

Cape Town - Free music has always been popular, but figures released by Amazon.com seem to show that it can also sell.

According to ReadWriteWeb Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license.

Even though free versions of Ghosts was readily available, it went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

Radiohead's In Rainbows, another high-profile album which was available for free for a limited time in late 2007, ended the year just outside of Amazon's Top 10 for 2008.

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability of the "free" music model early in 2008, but clearly, his own band has been able to make it work.

While overall album sales were down in 2008, bands like the Nine Inch Nails have been able to leverage their fan-base and bypass the traditional music industry channels - and still make a profit.

On the Creative Commons blog, Fred Benenson says a possible reason for this is that most fans probably want to support their favourite musicians by actually paying them directly for their music.

- News24