Launching Digital

Two different music recordings have been in the news. The new Nine Inch Nails (NIN) "Ghosts" project and (with a little less buzz) Melody Gardot. They're both interesting examples of success online, yet I believe their strategies have important differences.

Both have a low price point which is important, but NIN had popularized the album by using pirate music sites and offering exclusives at high price points. Also, I think a key difference is fan base. NIN is electronic music with a fan base interested in electronic media. (One promotional stunt they did was to leave USB drives with content on them in the bathrooms at their shows and the previous album was all tied up in a dystopian electronic surveillance theme.)

I think Gardot has used a much simpler model and grown in a much more impressive way than NIN. It is similar but I think there are important differences. Radiohead is a more similar comparison to NIN since they are both old groups with an established fan base.

An established band has the capital to set up a website and conduct online sales (the NIN interface is impressive). An emerging artist must rely on iTunes. The same is true in the book industry.

Dan Brown, for example, could set up a server, release an eBook and sell print copies via LuLu and give the publishing industry a wake up call. An emerging author would have to use iTunes something that many have not taken advantage of yet (despite Make Magazine presenting the concept at TOC this year). It may just be a matter of time before we see the same thing occur in books that we have seen in music. One could attribute this not happening yet to the slow speed of publishing or maybe it's just something that authors are not interested in. The parallel might hold true that established artists would have to pave the way with independent experiments and then the new comers might move along via iTunes (or some equivalent).

B