Read this morning that Trent Reznor is reporting some decent numbers for online sales of his new album, Ghosts I-IV. According to the article, 800,000 transactions generated about $1.6 million gross. Another interesting tidbit is that it may have only cost NIN $38 to distribute the album through Amazon.com’s MP3 store, in partnership with a company called TuneCore. I just checked, and Ghosts I-IV is still the number one album on the store. I’d like to see what kind of profit he’s looking at so far but I’d say that $1.6 million is a pretty good number considering that he also gave away the first 9 tracks of the album for free. I mentioned it before, but I went for the $10 option and I’m patiently waiting for my CD to arrive in the mail.
Radiohead wasn’t nearly as forthcoming with their numbers after In Rainbows launched and I think that was a mistake – it would only benefit everyone if the early adopters of this kind of digital distribution shared their results with the community.
