Creative Commons Doesn’t Cannibalize Sales
NIN Frontman Trent Reznor
(Photo by Capital M)
Chris Anderson recently posted “The best selling MP3 album of the year was free” on The Long Tail blog. Apparently, Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV was the best selling MP3 album of 2008 despite being released under a Creative Commons license that allowed for free, legal sharing.
The album grossed more than $1.6 million in revenue duing the first week in release. Creative Commons blog has more:
NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.
This would seem to be another big win for proponents of alternative models to the traditional intellectual property attitudes stemming from the physical goods economy.
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