Total music sales for 2007 were down by 9.5% in comparison to 2006, digital downloads included. The music industry as a whole has been in a state of decline in the years previous. The discussion on music piracy’s hand in this, and the music industry in general, is one of the most divisive and frustrating to be a part of this side of debates on health care reform and foreign policy. On one side, you have the RIAA – as expected, much of the information is true in a certain context, though not the context in which it’s presented. On the other hand, a host of people who are only united by their general opposition to the music industry or its representation in some aspect; whether it be the aforementioned RIAA press releases saying the sky is falling when it just might be a bit lower than it used to be, disdain for the status quo of the label, producers, and engineers getting paid before (and often more than) the artist in the end, or the more wobbly argument that torrenting is not, by definition, “stealing”, and therefore not wrong. Regardless, in the end, like all complex discussions, this is one where people can agree with more than one point of view, or none at all. It starts to make the “9/11 Conspiracy” debate look simple in comparison.
Trent Reznor is less interested in arguing about what’s right and wrong (though by no means does he keep quiet about those kinds of things), and more interested in a solution for the listener. Try before you buy? Selling the album at a fraction of the cost of a Big-Four released CD, and even then, pay only if you feel like it? In what other industry is the consumer at the very top of the power pyramid, and even more, in what other industry does the producer want the consumer to have that degree of power? Trent, for one.
Nearing the end of his label obligations, while touring in Australia, Trent started to make some of the most anti-label remarks of his career up to that point:
Has anyone seen the price come down? (Crowd: No) Okay, well, you know what that means — steal it. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing. Because one way or another, these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off, and that's not right.
Considering his album, Year Zero, was retailing in Australian stores for about $30US, it’s not hard to see that it can be frustrating to watch the music you make being peddled for a price that you know is unfair. For nearly every other commercial industry, there’s an easy way to keep prices low – competing products and brands that achieve the same result, for less. In music, there is no generic Nine Inch Nails replacement (or, more specifically, there are, but they are no substitute for the real thing). There is no way to keep prices down through competition within the same medium, as people don’t have a choice in what they want to like – they like what they like, and ability to obtain it comes second. Labels have preyed on this simple tenet for years to inflate prices; there’s no need for price fixing in an industry where there is (or, to be more correct) was no competition. Either you bought what you liked, or you bought nothing. That sort of thinking has been shattered by the digital age. In proof of how a system of exploitation can ruin the very monopoly that you’ve created, the love of a band does come before all – now, either you buy what you like, or you take what you like.
The fact that there exist a wide variety of encoding schemes and bitrates when making digital copies of songs and albums available over the digital music stores such as iTunes can make such options either more confusing for end users, or less enticing to audiophiles. For example, all iTunes store purchases not labeled as “iTunes Plus” tracks are encoded at 128kbps and with digital rights management, offering less than CD-quality music as well as restrictions on your capabilities of copying or playing your music on certain devices (namely, portable audio players that aren’t iPods). ITunes Plus tracks are recorded at a more agreeable 256kbps in AAC and without DRM, but have the same compatibility issue that presents a hurdle for the relative minority who own other-brand audio players, as well as the fact that much of their catalogue isn’t available as such. Amazon and Wal-Mart go the more traditional route with the more vanilla MP3 format, but licensing issues based on geographical limitations (namely, not living in the United States) somewhat underutilizes the internet’s far-reaching abilities to deliver proper content to anyone who is able to reach it. Given all of these middling issues, the fact that music lovers came out on their own to offer audio files in high-quality formats with no geographical limitations not only isn’t surprising, but has been a natural expectation of how industries are expected to evolve. Trent himself expressed some of the most honest, clearest, and most recent comments about the whole issue from him came about in an issue of NY Mag on October 30th, 2007, about the fall of the famed high-quality private tracker OiNK:
Trent: I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up. I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it — they're the hero. They're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band. I'm not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.
In an over-inflated industry where hundreds of millions of album sold per year is the norm, the mere 180,000 members of OiNK were one of the pins that helped deflate it – not necessarily their revenue, but their integrity. The fact that the end-user can do a better job than multi-billion dollar corporations is proof positive that it’s not infrastructure or cash flow that determines the ability of an entity to give customers what they want, but an understanding of what the customers want and the perseverance to distribute it. The result, from Trent’s view, was obvious – build everything from the ground up. Give them what they want in the high quality formats that they’re bypassing the most popular online stores to get, and beyond that, let the customer determine whether it’s worth it to pay or not after the fact – no strings attached. After all, if music lovers are torrenting music out of necessity in that CD’s are overpriced and legal downloads are of arguable quality, unavailable where they live, or aren’t automatically compatible with the devices they already own, this method seems like a slam dunk, doesn’t it?
On November 1st 2007, Trent Reznor and Saul Williams did that. Trent produced Saul’s album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, and came up with the distribution method in cooperation with Saul. Users could download the entire album for free as 192kbps MP3s, or pay a near-token $5 US for the liberty of also choosing either a 320kbps version of the album, or one in the lossless FLAC format for the ultimate in fidelity. This seems exactly like the kind of solution that would please Trent himself, and obviously removes practically every monetary, availability, and quality-based arguments against buying CDs or downloading music through entrenched online music stores.
The result? As Trent posted himself on www.nin.com:
Saul's previous record was released in 2004 and has sold 33,897 copies.
As of 1/2/08,
154,449 people chose to download Saul's new record.
28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning:
18.3% chose to pay.
Of those paying,
3220 chose 192kbps MP3
19,764 chose 320kbps MP3
5338 chose FLAC
Keep in mind not one cent was spent on marketing this record. The only marketing was Saul and myself talking as loudly as we could to anybody that would listen.
If 33,897 people went out and bought Saul's last record 3 years ago (when more people bought CDs) and over 150K - five times as many - sought out this new record, that's great - right?
I have to assume the people knowing about this project must either be primarily Saul or NIN fans, as there was very little media coverage outside our direct influence. If that assumption is correct - that most of the people that chose to download Saul's record came from his or my own fan-base - is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage - primarily from fans - seems disheartening.
Add to that: we spent too much (correction, I spent too much) making the record utilizing an A-list team and studio, Musicane fees, an old publishing deal, sample clearance fees, paying to give the record away (bandwidth costs), and nobody's getting rich off this project..
There seems to be a depressing tint to this news. To be honest, to myself and others, the plan seemed perfect – you choose the format and quality (with none being less than great to begin with), and make the optional price low enough that you could work even the most menial job for merely the same amount of time the the album runs to afford it. Beyond that, the money that’s being paid goes right to the artist, bypassing any blood-sucking intermediaries. It’s both a paying consumer’s and audiophile’s dream. When less than one out of five pay for an album that costs little in the first place, one has to wonder – where did everything go wrong?
Or, did it go wrong? Perhaps having this information down in concrete form is simply more jarring than the uncertain estimates about piracy. As of January 2nd, out of 154,449 people, 126,127 of them either didn’t feel that the album was worth paying $5 for, liked it but don’t have the money to pay $5 to the artist, didn’t have the ability to pay through the methods provided, or had no intention to pay for it in the first place. The first point is understandable, but, although many major publications didn’t review the album as there was no hard copy (I can only presume), many thought it was good enough to buy – I don’t want to turn this into a referendum on this album’s merits’ effect on the outcome of this sort of distribution model, but suffice it to say, I paid the $5 to have this in 320kbps and was more than happy to do it – in a way, I wish I was allowed to pay a bit more. For pure reference purposes only, I should point out that Pitchfork had no problem giving it 7.3/10, Rolling Stone’s painfully short review had 3/5 stars attached to it, and on a music discussions site I frequent often, sputnikmusic.com, the album was given a score of 3.8/5 by users. Most other independent sites come to the same conclusion. Any way you look at it, the quality is there enough to buy it. As for not having the money to buy it, I’m certainly sympathetic to that point of view – many people don’t have any money to spend on extraneous indulgences, and for many, music falls into that category – but does the majority of people who download music through computers on high-speed internet connections fall into that category? Perhaps those who are too young to have a credit card, which would be point three, but Saul also takes PayPal on his site, which only requires information about your bank account to make the transaction. I had my own account in my control when I was 12, and nowadays, that seems to be a late age to have that kind of control.
I don’t mean to imply that the majority of people who downloaded the album fall into the last category, but I can’t help shake the feeling that this project, in the end, served to prove that many of the arguments we use to justify downloading material only seem valid in the face of no real solution. These people did nothing wrong – they were offered free music, and simply took Saul and Trent up on that offer. There should be no guilt in that. But, just because the offer was made, and the medium of the internet seems to imply no cost to any of the parties involved, doesn’t mean that costs aren’t there. Beyond that, if the price had been higher, the quality been lower, and payment required to listen to it, would that inspire these same people to suddenly buy the album? Would everyone who bought it under these seemingly ideal circumstances have even bought it themselves? This is user-friendliness at its peak, and one wonders if the same friendliness was returned. At the same time, though, there are some puzzling omissions from this process – since Trent was already keen on the power and near-costless attributes of torrenting, why wasn’t the album torrented in the first place, thus nearly removing bandwidth costs save for the initial seeding? As of now, no one else is allowed to download the album for free from www.niggytardust.com, though they can still purchase it. Does this mean that people torrenting it themselves is counter to the current wishes of the artist, or simply a necessity based on cost? Do people who hear about the album later deserve less of a chance to get the music for free?
In that sense, the “experiment” raises as many questions as it answers. While it’s certainly a near-utopian deal with a great product in exchange, until we know the real “why’s” of people’s reasons for downloading songs when they’re just as available for purchase a few clicks in the other direction, we won’t know how to serve both the consumers’ and artists’ needs at the same time. What can’t be argued is that in the end, Trent wants nothing more than music to be in CD players rather than sitting on overpriced plots on store shelves, and since he’s biting the bullet so that the music’s for nothing, no one can argue that he succeeded where it counts.
