FTFA: "not one cent was spent on marketing this record"

And a good job they did of it, too. I hadn't heard of the thing until this article.

angrymacface: And a good job they did of it, too. I hadn't heard of the thing until this article.

Funny how that works, isn't it.

It is too bad considering the reason he did it. There was a great
article a few months back where Trent Reznor was getting all pumped
up on this idea after stopping into his local record store and
finding they were selling his CD for far more than others because it
had a slightly fancier cover and "his fans are the types who would
pay extra for it.". He probably did this as a reaction to this
feeling that his fans were getting ripped off.

Ya know, if the music had been...oh...what's that word people use?

Oh yeah..."Good." If the music had been good, I might have thrown a few bones at him. Nope, it was just NIN and bad rap.

EnderKR - Yeah, that always helps too.

I have to be honest: the name alone, "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust" didn't even entice me to check it out for free, much less pay for it.

Hey, man, do what you want, but I bet if you had a pay-what-you-want NIN album, it would probably have earned money. Saul Williams? Who the fark is he, and why do I care? Because you said I should? That's no different from what the labels are doing.

Saul Williams is a straight up badass on the mic. The new album is good but you can tell Trent went overboard on the producing angle and put a lot of NIN into it. Don't get me wrong they are good but a lot of them aren't Saul beats and don't compare to his older albums. I did like this album though it had some solid tracks.

tracks 1,3,5,7,8,10,12,14,15 were all really good.

I bought it, and I like it.

It's basically a NIN album sung by a soulful black man. I'm no Reznor fanboy but I like his production.

Anyway, I heard about it through word of mouth, and I opted to pay for the lossless files (5 bucks) since, like I said, I am mostly interested in the production.

Album was OK...

Too much of Reznor's influence though...

Liked Saul Williams BEFORE he turned into Nine Inch Nails...

In the publics' defense, he let them violate him. He let them desecrate him. What did he expect?

Album? What album?

SubBass49: Album was OK...

Too much of Reznor's influence though...

Liked Saul Williams BEFORE he turned into Nine Inch Nails...

I downloaded it and wasn't impressed enough to pay. I'm a big NIN fan and like some of Saul's work but this album just didn't do it for me. I've listened to it twice and haven't touched it since.

Although to be honest I'll probably toss five bucks his way once I'm working again, just to support an artist.

Trent Reznor "disheartened" to learn that more people didn't pay for an album they had the option to download for free

How is this "obvious"? In the store I work at, the best selling album of the past week by a long shot is In Rainbows. A quick samplin suggests 3/4 of them hadn't even bothered with the download, and waited for the CD.

What did Trent really expect to happen? Saul Williams does not equal Radiohead in terms of mainstream exposure. A grassroots, word-of-mouth online album release wasn't going to get the big dollar. Not to mention, 192 kbps is a reasonable sound quality for the average iPod listener. Heck, I only use 160 VBR, but that has more to do with the fact that my iPod is a 10 GB fossil. Giving the album away for free in that bitrate was probably not going to offer a lot of incentive to pay for it even if one did end up liking it. Sure, you pay to support the artist, but most users aren't going to go back to pay for something they already have. Common sense. Put those two factors together, and you'll see why it didn't work so well.
It seems that what Trent is really complaining about is that he spent a ton of money on making the record and can't really hope to make that money back. Sorry, dude, I don't have a lot of sympathy. You went overboard on producing the heck out of an album for an artist who's not too well known. Have some foresight and know when to put on the brakes. You took a chance, which is praise-worthy in a time when most artists don't, but it didn't work quite as planned. Take notes (as Trent has done) and move on. Emphasis on the latter.

That's a little over $141,000 directly to the artist in just over two months.

If Saul had a normal record deal, he would have seen somewhere around 50-75 cents per sale, or $14,000-$21,000.

He should be ecstatic that an unknown artist got this kind of cash so fast.

/I would have made the free version 128kbps, but oh well.
//Buy it, it's worth 5 bucks. Great stuff.

To avoid bandwidth costs, he should have used a torrent.

"Niggy Tardust," you say? The name alone and a faint memory of once liking NIN convinced me to download it (for free, of course).

After scanning through this album, I'm wondering to myself "what the fark was Trent thinking?" Was he trying to capitalize off the poor, ignorant taste of todays mainstream hiphop fans, or did he really think that shiat sounded good? Maybe it was all satire . . . I can only hope.

The funniest part to me was that the only song I thought was cool on the whole album ended up being a very non-urban cover of U2 (whom I despise).

Has Saul Williams ever sold 20K+ albums before? Regardless, even if Saul only nets $4 for each sale with $1 to cover the website, bandwidth, etc., he still made $113,288. At the industry standard of around $1 per CD, he'd have to sell 113,228 or more to net the same income. Sounds like he did pretty well financially. Plus, he generated probably thousands if not tens of thousands new fans who may pay for the next album.

"not one cent was spent on marketing this record"

Wrong.

Do you have any idea how much money was spent on marketing "Trent Reznor" around the world over the past 20 years to bring him to the point where the name "Trent Reznor" can now market itself?

A couple of issues not discussed here -

1. There are cowriters on the project that have to be paid - including the cover of Sunday Bloody Sunday (U2)

2. Somebody had to pay for making the record. Unless Reznor and the rest of the credited programmers, etc donated their time, materials and studios, those are costs that need to come out of the "profits".

3. Musicane - the online distributor, pays 60% to the artist on a free account 80% on a 19.99 a month account.

So rough figures would put 4 bucks per paid CD to the artist (on the 80% account).

There are 15 songs on the "album". It is pretty safe to say a buck a record is going to the cowriters - plus the admin it takes to deal with the payments etc.

So it gets closer to 3 bucks a paid download and then the studios etc need to get paid - or they may be sharing in the "profit"

Saul is a bit of a legend in the underground hip hop scene, but he's never going to have the sort of appeal that is going to sell a ton of records. His style is very abstract. I think Reznor should be happy with the results. How much have Saul's previous albums sold? Sure, Reznor had his name all over the production, but most underground hip hop fans aren't big on NiN, and most NiN fans have never heard of Saul.

If El-P or RJD2 produced a Saul record, I think it would have been better received. I haven't downloaded the album and probably won't. I'm just not into hip hop anymore and I'm well away from Reznor's sound, although I did buy a single of his back during "The Fragile" because it had a Porter Ricks remix.

The net label Thinner recently had an album that I think had over 100,000 downloads, but I have no idea how many people made a donation. For a true independent label to have that sort of reception in an area of music that definitely does NOT have any sort of mass appeal is quite astounding.

Bought this the day it became available, and my wife actually re-purchased it a couple days later. We didn't feel too stupid because hey, $10, still less than one copy of a CD anyhow, and we have it in FLAC.

The music is great, and Saul Williams sounds very much like a NYC Trent Reznor, it's odd sometimes. And we were happy to support an under-appreciated artist by giving money directly to them, rather than to some record company that keeps it all anyway.

Now, here are some of your no-name bands. Sonic Youth? Nine Inch Nails?

I guess now he is going to write and then remix an emo/angsty song about it.

i love this album. fark the nay-sayers.

batsforsteadman: i love this album. fark the nay-sayers.

i was dying to love this album, downloaded it for free to check it out, and wasn't moved by a single track.

i wouldn't have heard *any* of it if i couldn't have downloaded it for free, though, as it's gotten no other exposure via the radio i listen to...so i think they succeeded in bypassing the traditional marketing means. that's hip.

/why did we need a cover of "sunday bloody sunday," btw?

Glitchwerks:
If El-P or RJD2 produced a Saul record, I think it would have been better received. I haven't downloaded the album and probably won't. I'm just not into hip hop anymore and I'm well away from Reznor's sound, although I did buy a single of his back during "The Fragile" because it had a Porter Ricks remix.


It's really not very hip-hop at all...more like spoken-word NIN...

saul williams doesn't make hip hop music..

i just sold one of my three copies of "downward spiral" to some cad for $250.

why did i have three copies? i'm a price gouger. and i don't like nine inch nails fans.