NIN: The New Model Of Giving It All Away

While the RIAA and the rest of the music industry clamor for ways to restrict consumers and how they can use the content they buy, Trent Reznor and his band, Nine Inch Nails, are pioneering some alternative methods for distributing content to their fans and promoting the band — giving it away for free!

While Trent has been giving away his bands new music for some time now, this new experiment involves giving away high-quality, raw video footage of the bands shows.  In early 2009 the band decided to release 405 Gigabytes of raw video recordings from 3 shows of their 2008 Lights In The Sky tour…for free.  Fans could download the raw footage and do with it as they pleased.  This may seem like a crazy idea, but the fans ate it up.  Thousands of videos have since been created and shared by fans from these videos, and theatrical screenings have been carried out as well.  Most of the music industry would probably never even think about giving music — much less raw video footage — away to fans for free, so what made Nine Inch Nails do it?

Nine Inch Nails may have been hoping that the fans could take the video footage and create something new and innovative with the footage, and this is exactly what happened.  Not only have several DVD’s been compiled by fan groups, but I’m sure it has helped spread awareness of the band and recruit more Nine Inch Nails fans along the way.  According to the band’s site:

For 12 months, a core team of dozens of fans and a network of thousands spanning the entire globe pooled their efforts to create this professional-quality 1080p 5.1 concert film, and have released it in every format from Blu-ray and DVD to iPod and YouTube. It combines footage from all three shows and includes DVD menus, bonus footage, a PDF booklet, and more. That something of this scale was produced entirely by fans, on their own time, purely for the sake of giving something back to the community, is absolutely unprecedented. You can read all about the project and find all the download links here, or watch it immediately on YouTube here. Theatrical screenings are already being organized, you can find more info about those here.

This is yet another example of a devoted fanbase and a policy of openness combining to fill in blanks left by old media barriers. The entire NIN camp is absolutely thrilled that treating our fans with respect and nurturing their creativity has led to such an overwhelming outpour of incredible content, and that we now have such a high quality souvenir from our most ambitious tour ever. Or, as Trent simply put it, “Nine Inch Nails fans kick ass.”

So we see that by releasing this footage, the content was able to be used by fans in all kinds of ways that never would have been possible had the videos been kept, or used to make a typical DVD disc that could be sold to fans for a profit.

A New Model?

Of course, musicians still need to make money, right?  Can this new model of giving content away actually be sustainable?  I think it can.  In fact, I think this is a new model that many other bands are already following, wether they like it or not.

It’s pretty common knowledge that almost any remotely popular or well-known piece of music (or film) can probably be downloaded online for free via file sharing networks.  Nine Inch Nails and other bands such as Radiohead embrace and support this type of sharing amongst its fans, but for those who do not support it: I believe they are reaping the benefits anyway.

What benefits?  Well, when the content is free, it will reach more people, which means there is a much wider audience for the music, which translates into more fans.   This results in more sales of band merchandise, as well as more tickets sold for concerts.  Both of these things bring in more money direct to the musicians than do CD sales anyway, so who is it really hurting — the musician, or the music labels?

Whether we like it or not, this new model of free content is here and doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon.  Even musicians that don’t support it may be dragged along for the ride, and those that do embrace it are already being surrounded by a lively and excited fan-base.  We see with Nine Inch Nails’ latest endeavor how much great new content and creativity can come from the free-sharing ideas and content, and the end result is better for for everyone, not just the band — and isn’t that how things are supposed to be anyway?

I think the real lesson that we are learning is that music and creativity are free; they can’t be bottled up and protected.  Once you’ve released something to the world, you can’t take it back — once it’s out there, it’s out there.  Benjamin Franklin summed this up quite nicely when he said:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

Is file-sharing and the free-spread of content and ideas really a new model, or is it the only model?