Nine Inch Nails Tracks Downloads of 'The Slip' via Google Earth

Over 1.4 million unique users have downloaded the free Nine Inch Nails album The Slip, according to the band, since they posted it in the MP3 format on May 5. To give people an interesting way to see where the album was most popular, Nine Inch Nails has posted a Google Earth file that lets […]

Theslip

Over 1.4 million unique users have downloaded the free Nine Inch Nails album The Slip, according to the band, since they posted it in the MP3 format on May 5. To give people an interesting way to see where the album was most popular, Nine Inch Nails has posted a Google Earth file that lets you rotate and zoom in on the planet, with red lines emanating outward like gigantic skyscrapers in the spots where the album was downloaded the most.

Hotspots include the Eastern America, Europe, Japan, and eastern Australia. According to the map, not a single person has downloaded The Slip to Antarctica.

But who would have suspected that out of the Hawaiian Islands, The Slip would have been most popular on the isle of Oahu? Or that four people in Suva, Fiji have downloaded the album? In fact, Fijians, if you're out there, Trent says he wants to crash on your couch.

In a note addressed to his fellow artists, Reznor points out that the idea for this map came from his collaboration with TopSpin,
the next-generation music sales and marketing company that allows bandsto implement similar strategies to those of Radiohead and Nine InchNails. (Topspin helped Nine Inch Nails with hosting when demand hadcrashed the band's servers in the past.)

The idea for this visualization originally came from some data sent to us by Topspin.
These guys helped us out with our digital delivery for a while and arein my opinion the best option out there for artists to deliver theirgoods to their audience on their own terms. Keep an eye on them - theyare leagues ahead of everyone else in terms of infrastructure andphilosophy.

While we're on the topic, another company Reznor seems to like is TuneCore. As with Ghosts I-IV, Reznor used TuneCore to distribute The Slip to iTunes and five other online music stores (although savvy shoppers will note that it's still available for free). A TuneCore spokesman wouldn't confirm that Reznor had paid the standard price, but surely he could have afforded it. A 10 song album (like The Slip) costs only $35.82 to distribute to six digital music stores, with a $19.98 annual fee for each year the album continues to be sold.

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(via Music Ally)