With all the chaos in the music industry, there’s some bands that get where it’s headed and are doing things right. Last night Nine Inch Nails put a new album on their site (really 4 albums together) unannounced with the offer to download the 1st of the 4 albums for free, or all 4 for $5. There were also CD options and a $300 limited edition CD / book set. The word of mouth spread pretty quick and basically shut down the site. After they re-worked it and got the site working, I went for the $5 option and got 2 hours of DRM-free music, a pdf of some kickass photography tied into the albums, a batch of desktops, and some other graphics. Not bad for $5. Amazingly (really, not so amazingly) the 2500 limited edition $300 sets sold out in less than a day. I’m not even that into them, but it’s awesome to see a band looking to the future and working to engage their listeners and creating some inspiring marketing. Their site is on it too – give you the tools to remix songs, enable you to post them, and download others.

Free is the value of music, and it needs to be leveraged into other ways of generating cash. Fuck yeah.