Like Chris Anderson says in his Wired article, the cost of distributing digital content to the consumer is so minuscule, just 1% of customers who choose to pay for an item can cover the 99% that don’t.

This model has recently worked in the music industry (I see a pattern emerging here), with first Radiohead and later Nine Inch Nails discovering that this formula is also a viable way to sell music. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails put the first 9 songs of his 4 disc instrumental album, Ghosts I-IV online for a free download. Fans could pay $5 for a high-quality download of the complete 36-track album or fork out even more for limited edition Cd’s. Because he didn’t have to give anything to record companies, Reznor made more from the online download than he did from his biggest selling traditional album, The Downward Spiral.

Reznor is an artist that is embracing the idea of free digital content in many interesting ways. Not only did he purposely leak his music to notorious torrent sharing site, The Pirate Bay, he actually gave away his most recent album The Slip, in its entirety, completely for free (and it’s bloody good to). In addition, he has set up remix.nin.com where fans can remix any of his songs and post them on the site for rating, downloading and sharing. He also started his own film festival on Youtube where fans could use songs from Ghosts I-IV to create a short film.

Thanks for staying with me, I do have a point. Reznor has done all this as part of the Creative Commons movement, yet another exciting element of the freenomenon, not really mentioned in the readings. Creative Commons lets artists apply their own copyright and choose whether they want it to be in the public domain (ie. free to use by anyone) or place a ‘rights reserved’ on it (permission needs to be sought to use it). Basically they offer their intellectual property for free, so long as the original artist is credited.

Sorry if this has been all about the music industry and not much about journalism. But I think what Reznor is doing ties in with the free content debate nicely. I promise to be more journalistic based next week… maybe.

P.S I hate word counts!