Music by donation: Trent Reznor reports
A couple of months back, Trent Reznor produced an album by Saul Williams and they offered it as a free download with optional US$5 payment. Now Trent has released the results of the experiment on his site. Basically, he seems disappointed with the revenues that they received. About 154,000 people downloaded the music, and about 28,000 (18%) chose to pay the $5. As Trent says, once production costs are taken into account, “nobody’s getting rich off this project”, even though they spent nothing on marketing and very little on distribution. The donation model looks like it’s going to be a pretty difficult one to pull off. Most likely, I think it’ll be used by lesser-known acts to get themselves established. But, Radiohead aside, I don’t think we’ll see many major artists using it.
3 Comments
But with the increase in file sharing and decline in record sales, music contracts will move to more revenue generated by touring. If you download for free and listen you’re more likely to fork out the $100+ for the ticket. And if you’ve got the first album cheap less likely to pay for the second eg Artic Monkeys.
One critical point to bear in mind here: Trent/Saul were asking people to pay for music that they hadn’t heard before! I wonder how many more folks would have paid the $5 if they had been able to preview the music before downloading? You have to figure some, perhaps even a significant number, of those who downloaded for free were simply trying to see what the music was like… right?
On the other hand, people paid (ridiculously up to 40 pounds UK) for an album they had never heard either. Odd.
-G.