The new Nine Inch Nails album is fantastic. It carries on the path from The Fragile to Lost Highway and Still, the path that was lost when Trent took 3 years off and then released With_Teeth. Trent's said that Ghosts wouldn't have been possible to release on a major label, which is easily believable. The songs aren't particularly catchy, (aside from 3 Ghosts I), and they take time to absorb. It's the kind of music I love, the kind that takes a while to take hold, and that rewards focused attention and repeated listening.
The release of the album, with a free section, and tiered pricing iterates on the low purchase rate of Niggy Tardust, which was released on the same model as In_Rainbows. I think Trent's experience with Saul Williams is not as instructive as it seems, since it seems the majority interested in hearing the album were NIN fans, not Saul's fans. A lot of my problem with the napster-bittorrent method of obtaining music is that it's easy to download the whole album to find out if you like it, but then difficult to convince yourself to go and pay for something you already "have". Niggy Tardust fell into the same trap, for people unfamiliar with saul's music.
The Ghosts experiment eases the issue by making a full quarter of the album readily available, and then adding value for higher pricing tiers. It's a lesson in Market Segmentation, so that people who just love the music can get in the door for $5 (or less for single tracks on amazon MP3), while people who have the money and appreciate physical discs and booklets can get more at a higher tier. It will be interesting to see how much better this album fares than Niggy Tardust did, although as slashdot points out the limited edition collector's box has already done well. The immediately foreseeable issue is that a) Not all albums have as easy a distinction to make between free sections and the whole album, and b) Most artists can't sell out a $300 box set in two days. The former might solve itself, though, if the experiment works to the level of influencing album releases, the way double sided LP's and cassettes once did.
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