Music Industry Archive

A pretty good haul for our buddy Trent if I don’t say so myself.

If we google first week CD sales numbers for the last three Nine Inch Nails records, (Year Zero, With Teeth, The Fragile) we can see that they each sold between 200,000-300,000 copies. (Apologies for not having exact numbers, my SoundScan access expired) Already an impressive feat for Ghosts as its first week numbers almost triple any one of the previous records.

“But what about the free downloads skewing the numbers?” you may ask.

At the end of the day, what matters most to the artist? Money. Ghosts‘ $1.6 million take goes ALL to Nine Inch Nails (yes, then they have to pay for bandwidth, manufacturing, distribution, and whatnot). Contrast that with the horrid cuts that major label contracts give to an artist on CD sales (normally $1-$2 per record sold, not including advance repayments). Say Trent made $2 per record for one of his last 3 records. At an average of 250,000 copies sold, he would take in $500,000 from first week sales. That’s almost one-third what he’s pulling in now from Ghosts!

If you were a major artist, which way would you want to sell your record?

Granted, time will tell if Ghosts will have staying power and continue to take in revenue. A big chunk of that $1.6 million was due to the $750,000 from the “ultra limited edition” that will never be sold again. However, my intuition tells me that the costs in recording this latest all-instrumental album were much less than a traditional nin album and that Trent probably already has a good return on his investment already.

It’ll be interesting to see how this model works with other artists or even a “real” Nine Inch Nails album. But from the looks of things, Trent is onto something here.