I had this big long article written about how the Nine Inch Nails release of Ghosts totally whips anything that has been done before. I mean, it makes Radiohead’s release look pretty limp and tepid when you consider everything. Radiohead had big fanfare when they released their In Rainbows album, but all Trent Reznor did initially to promote the Ghosts I-IV album was put a blog post on the NiN website and ask that people Digg it.

Then there are things like the 160kbs quality MP3s of Radiohead verses the lossless files of NiN. The fact that NiN are doing this without any outside help at all, not even releasing it via normal conventional means. You follow all thats happening and you start to get pretty impressed.

Having said all that, I have both In Rainbows and Ghosts I-IV and I can’t stop listening to Ghosts I-IV. In Rainbows I was pretty indifferent to and didn’t bother going back to pay for it in the end. I don’t think its got more than one play in iTunes unless its been hit in the shuffle now and then.

The difference for me is not so much that I got both for free initially, but more that I was able to legally get the whole album of both for free. But while online distribution from Radiohead was controlled and legally limited to their own approved methods, Trent Reznor himself was the first and primary seed for the Ghosts I album on The Pirate Bay and Mininova.

Now, I admit I first downloaded all 4 parts of the album in MP3 format from Pirate Bay. But after listening through it all a few times, I went back and paid the $5 for the full FLAC quality version.

For those that aren’t aware, FLAC is the Free Lossless Audio Codec. Rather than cutting the top and bottom off audio the way MP3s or even OGGs do, it instead is more like compressing a WAV file inside some sort of ZIP-like archive. And this is truly what separates Nine Inch Nails from Radiohead. 160kbs MP3s against lossless audio tracks… Theres no competition. I’d have gladly paid $5 for In Rainbows if I’d gotten something better than 160kbs MP3s.

Its funny… The Eagles are doing similar as well. They released their “Long Road out of Eden” album (both the deluxe and the normal versions) as a digital download as well as the other “normal” media. For $15 you get a FLAC copy of the Delux album, or for $14 you can have it as 256kbs MP3s. Alternatively, you can have the normal album in FLAC format for $12, or the MP3s for $11. Which do you think would be my choice?

And this is the thing that I think a lot of people in the RIAA/MPAA don’t seem to understand. I’ll gladly pay for unencumbered audio and video. By unencumbered I mean NO DRM and in formats I can easily transport (such as MP3 and FLAC or MPEG4 and DivX) across multiple devices, platforms and probably the most important of all, regions.

I am in no rush to buy a BluRay player. Why would I rush out to get a device for which the media is locked up? Why can I not go to the US, bring a movie back to NZ and expect to play it? This was an issue with DVD for a while. Fortunately, makers of most players got smart and unlocked their devices from any specific region. Unfortunately, the encryption within BluRay (and HD-DVD was guilty too) mean that its not likely to ever happen for that format. Sony have a strangle-hold on it.

Its very rare I buy music. Even CDs rarely entice me any more. Looking down my small stack of CDs, I can’t even remember which one was the most recently bought. Its either an Our Lady Peace album, or a P.O.D. album. I can’t remember now. However, I gladly paid for the FLAC version of Ghosts I-IV because I can put that on CD at CD quality. I can convert that to MP3. In fact the first thing I did was convert it to Apple Lossless to put on my iPod Touch. And I don’t have to feel the mandatory guilt because Trent Reznor himself has said we can and should do exactly that. He even invites us to use it and abuse it in our own mashups or share it with our friends or whatever else we want to do. And he’s still making money from the album. Big money.

Unencumbered media is the way of the future. The sooner the media companies realise that, the sooner they’ll start getting people buying more from them again. They need to get over this whole Profit-by-lawsuit business strategy they have latched on to, but thats something totally different and not for this discussion.

Nine Inch Nails are showing the business model of the future. And there is nothing stopping the mainstream music industry doing the same. Indy artists have had no choice but to build a business this way until they’re signed. Its all about producing good quality music that people want. Use Last.FM or MySpace or any of the other social media out there to get it in front of people. If people appreciate they product, they’ll reward it as they think it deserves.

The new era of the music economy has begun. The RIAA is already a generation behind with the Amazon MP3 music store. Do you think they’ll adapt fast enough?