I bought NIN's album for $5 on Amazon to support Trent for distributing his work in an enlightened manner. $5 for 3 dozen CD-quality tracks, DRM-free, off Amazon. Download was as fast as iTunes or Steam or any other respectable online download service.

I made the decision to do that after downloading the first part of it for free on the Pirate Bay.

It was the first time I bought music fair and square in about 10 years.

I have very fond memories of my sumer of 1991 listening to [Pretty Hate Machine]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Hate_Machine ) while doing a road trip that ended with an unplanned stop at washington's [Lollapalooza 1991 ]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollapalooza ) with NIN playing. To see that particular band be one of the rare ones to act like "real" artists make me happy.

FYI, you can get the first nine tracks for free on the official website. No need to hit the Pirate Bay.

http://ghosts.nin.com/main/order_options

I too paid the $5 for the whole thing, partly to support the distribution model, partly because of the 36 kickass tracks. One of my friends bought the $300 set. I'm planning to experience that vicariously through him.

The downloads on their site were down on Monday due to overwhelming demand.

Yeah that was kinda sad... it's the reason I ended up just using the Amazon link... thankfully I don't really care about the FLAC versions.

I wish all artists would put up a website with a paypal tip jar. I'd download the music for free then tip them $3 to $5 for each album downloaded. That would circumvent the label, since it wasn't directly a fee related to the album. It's just a tip from me to them. I don't know if the typical record company contract would allow this, though.

Sure, I'll say it: If you're saying that publicity is free, you're still wrong.

This isn't even a very new model. People have been getting music for free through radio for a long time. What labels have done so far is little more than changing the transport from radio to web.

^ He dropped his label and is now doing his own. Also it is revolutionary to sell direct.

I guarantee you that there have been artists selling some music directly to customers ever since people have been able to record music. No, even before that.

This guy used the labels and middlemen extensively already, so he is really a terrible example of this revolution.

Someone needs to make it easy for artists to do this. They want it, and users want it.

Downloading is easy, it's hard to create the demand and traffic for a particular artist. You're back to square one since to do that, you should have a large music site so you get a lot of traffic and can promote various artists. And then you're in competition with iTunes and Amazon.