Trent Reznor Bravely Reveals Niggy Tardust Numbers
By: Mozzer | in: Music |The results are in for Saul Williams’ ambitious music download project and the numbers are “disheartening”. Posted on NIN.com, Trent Reznor reveals that of those who downloaded ‘The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust’ only a dismal 18% chose to pay. In fact, the digital album fared worse than Saul’s previous release in 2004 which sold 33,897 copies.
Trent states plainly: 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
He goes on to point out the associated costs of production, bandwidth, distribution, etc. It’s clear that very little money, if any, was made on this venture. The disheartening part is that the majority of the 154,000 downloaders are presumed to be Williams’ and NIN’s existing fanbase - a group who’ve overwhelmingly declined to pay $5. It’s a sad statement indeed when even the most ardent of fans will accept these recordings and give nothing in return. With these disappointing figures, perhaps the honor system of digital music acquisition should seriously be reconsidered.
Saul Williams - Skin of a Drum (fan-made video)
Read Trent Reznor’s complete post here
Visit the Niggy Tardust Website
Posted on January 5, 2008
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6 Responses to “Trent Reznor Bravely Reveals Niggy Tardust Numbers”
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Trent is such a douche.
Everyone considers this a great failure.
So the album made over $140,000. No marketing costs, no packaging costs and they didn’t have to share the income with record stores. Did they spend all that amount on recording the album? What are they crazy?
Considering this is a very difficult album with no discerning “hits” or chance for mass appeal, what exactly were they expecting? NIN at least pulls out a couple of radio friendly tunes to coincide with each release. They also release videos and invest in marketing.
I have great respect for them for doing this, but I don’t understand what they’re bitching about. There are plenty of left-of-centre good artists who don’t get to shift 30,000 units. They also don’t get to record top notch (apparently very expensive) album with Trent Reznor.
Again, I do appreciate what they did, but the fact people consider a $0 marketing album that sells 30,000 copies a failure is disgraceful.
Your points are well made, char.
I think Trent’s disapointed that his established fanbase didn’t pick up the slack and pony-up the cash. His mistake was he spent too much on production (it sounds great!) and zero on marketing. Another reason for the low numbers: most NIN fans may not easily take to Williams’ spoken word/psuedo-rap compositions. Although ‘Tardust’ comes close to bridging the gap, both artists are of two distinct genres.
The numbers are bit skewed anyway. As some others have pointed out, they downloaded first and later paid $5 for the hi-res version. I did the same; I downloaded the free album as a preview and a few days later paid the $5 (although I didn’t care to d/l the hi-res files). So I may have been counted as “downloaded twice, paid once”.
On the next outing, they would do well to get rid of the “free” price point and get a bit more marketing behind the album. $5 is the sweet spot for me.
I paid my $5. I don’t see why people out there coudln’t anti-up that little amount of money. I realize there are a lot of things that can be said about the amount of money spent, but come on people. $5.
If people have a finite amount of “entertainment” cash then it seems logical to assume that they would do whatever they could to stretch it out, principles non-withstanding. I also think Char and Mozzer hit the proverbial nail on the head.
Charbarred makes some very good points as does Mozzer. I’m not sure what Trent was expecting, though 18.3% does seem low. To many people, the difference between $5 and $0 is negligible, especially considering on how much gas or how many cigs that amount will buy you, and maybe that was the problem. An interesting experiment would be if a bigger name than Saul (sorry, man — I love your spoken word but your rap doesn’t do as much for me) would put an album up for $5, no more, no less. No choice of paying no money, but a very reasonable price nonetheless. Also, maybe they (Saul and Trent) should consider this the marketing part of the process and put the hardcopy disc on the market next and see how it sells. Radiohead is number one in the UK this week. Granted, it’s not a big week, but still — there were plenty of naysayers who decried the end of the compact disc, etc., etc. — it it’s doing better than many had expected.