I wanted to follow up a bit on yesterday's post, regarding the band Nine Inch Nails making tons of money despite releasing their latest album on torrent sites under a Creative Commons License.

This actually was not the first time Nine Inch Nails has experimented with progressive, open-source concepts in relation to it's music.  Trent Reznor (band founder) has dabbled in this sort of thing before.

The last Nine Inch Nails album, Year Zero was made available for free on the Nine Inch Nails web site, as an audio stream.  While not downloadable, anyone could listen to the album for free whenever they wanted, even skipping tracks if they desired.

Moreover, the tracks from that album were later released in a format as similar to Open Source as possible in the world of music.  All of the tracks were uploaded to the Nine Inch Nails site as multitrack audio files, which meant that anyone with multi-track audio editing programs could isolate tracks from the songs and remix at will.  Trent encouraged users to remix his songs and even hosts many of them on the site.  Fan remixes were later released as a free torrent album, much like the recent official album.

Despite the 'source' for these songs being freely available, the album still sold incredibly well.  The album and many of its songs remained on top of the Billboard charts for weeks.

Leading up to the release of Year Zero, Nine Inch Nails orchestrated an Alternate Reality Game, with clues to a story surrounding the album peppered throughout the internet.  One manifestation of this game was the creation of dozens of sites that were meant to exist within the fictional world detailed by the album.  One of these sites, meant to be a resistance movement against an oppressive government regime, was the Open Source Resistance.

There is no question that Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor embraces and promotes the Open Source Philosophy, and his actions continually show that he is willing to put his money where is mouth is, by releasing albums under copyleft licenses and uploading his songs in source format.  Nine Inch Nails proves that embracing the Open Source mindset does not mutually exclude commercial gain.