About 28,000 people who downloaded "Niggy Tardust," the Saul Williams record produced by Trent Reznor, opted to pay $5 for the album, the Nine Inch Nails frontman said on his site. The rest of the
154,000 downloaders took Williams and Reznor up on their offer to take the album for free.
Reznor said on his blog that he found it "disheartening" that only about 18% chose to pay. At the
same time, however, he acknowledged that offering the tracks for free seems to have greatly increased Williams' exposure. "Saul's music is in more peoples' iPods than ever before and people are
interested in him," Reznor wrote. Williams' previous album sold around 34,000 copies since it was released in 2004.
Williams and Reznor aren't the only musicians to experiment with new
business models. In a well-publicized move, Radiohead last year made its new album, "In Rainbows," available on a pay-what-you-wish basis. In the first three weeks the tracks were online, six in 10
downloaders didn't pay anything, according to comScore. Of those who paid, the average contribution was $6. (Radiohead disputes these figures, but hasn't yet issued its own.)
Musicians and
industry executives will undoubtedly scrutinize these results, but it's still way too early to draw any definitive conclusions. It often takes time for albums to find their audiences or for casual
listeners to turn into paying fans.
Consider also, "In Rainbows" is now No. 1 on the music charts, having sold 122,000 copies since its release on Jan. 1 -- three months after the group
offered it online for free. On one hand, that's less than half of the 300,000 copies the band's last album sold on its first week out. At the same time, it also shows that making free tracks available
online isn't inconsistent with also selling them.