nine inch nails leading radical changes in the music industry by distributing concert video for free

The popularity of the iPod, iTunes music store, and MP3s has forever changed the music industry. The big record labels have lost control. They've lost control of their audience, artists, and their revenue. Fueling this fire is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor who recently told fans to steal his music because he was outraged at the price of his CD in Australia.

But rather than label him a heretic, I think Trent is a visionary when it comes to the music industry. He knows that the old record labels' model doesn't work anymore and rather than hang-on for dear life (as the labels seem to be doing) he is embracing the change and leading it. His last two albums were released for free over the internet. Other bands (Radiohead) also did this last year. In the process NIN also released many tracks in editable formats similar to what they use in the studio and therefore created a strong online community filled with remixed versions of the music.

The other day, NIN took this a step further. Everyone thought it was odd that three of the recent concerts had "relaxed camera policies", including the Sacramento show I went to. Anyone could bring a camera to the concert; digital, video, SLR, whatever. And now the cat is out of the bag. NIN released 400 GBs (yes gigabytes, not megabytes) of concert video through their website www.nin.com. This is so much data that I wouldn't even be able to put it on my computer if I deleted everything from my hard drive, including the operating system! (I only have 180 GB.)

This is an interesting experiment for a couple of reasons:

1. It tests the capabilities of technology. They're using bit torrent to distribute the files and this demonstrates how much the internet has evolved in the past 9 years. Most people wouldn't have dreamed of transferring 400 gigs of data over the internet back in 2000. Few people even had hard drives that big.
   
2. They gave this footage away for free. Sure, this is raw footage but it's certainly valuable. However, thinking about the cost to produce and distribute a DVD from it using the record label's old model would have been expensive. Shooting the video is the easy (and cheap) part.
   
3. They understand user generated content. One of the reason's YouTube is so popular is because of this trend towards UGC (User Generated Content), meaning videos that people make themselves. As I mentioned in my post about democratizing creativity, video editing equipment is so affordable and easy to use that almost anyone can make something. I think Nine Inch Nails is counting on that happening. By releasing all this raw HD video, some skilled editors will put together one hell of a good concert movie.

Nine Inch Nails is way ahead of their time doing this type of thing. But the question is, how do they make money from it? Will the trend be that musicians make their money doing concerts but give their music away for free? I'd be all for that since it'd mean more shows for the true fans.