Trent Reznor – marketer of the year
Matt Mason has a great post today noting that Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV was Amazon’s best-selling album of 2008 - despite also being available as a free download.
Sampling has long been a valid marketing tactic, but giving the whole thing away and still expecting to sell it? And it working?? It’s a cracking anecdote and sparks some great talking points:
- should companies with copyable products (including books, magazines and tv programmes) routinely offer a free option?
- Is the trick to lure people in with the basic product free, then upsell them to an added-value version?
- do people prefer to pay for things they value?
- would this work as well (or better?) for products in less glamorous sectors?
- Is the success of this promotional tactic repeatable or will it only work while a novelty?
In my mind it shows yet again that successful responses to market disruption are not always obvious or comfortable.
[update] NIN’s latest contrary tactic is to use bit torrent (usually the scourge of the music industry) to distribute acres of HD concert footage for fans to remix. Again – great engagement marketing
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This is exactly the strategy that green and blacks adopt i found out recently. Its their main marketing vehicle and it has worked tremendously.
This tactic had similar success when Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ at the end of 2007. The hype surrounding a free album download where users used an ‘honesty box’ payment scheme resulted in huge downloads, many paid for, wiith the resulting physical format release still acheiving huge commercial sales.