Amazon’s bestselling MP3 album of 2008 was Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV, which was priced at either
- $5.00 through Amazon’s MP3 and other music marketplaces or
- $0.00 through legal, backchannel MP3 download sites with an attached Creative Commons license.
You can put this scenario through a lot of different frameworks and rationalizations to try to understand it, but the bottom line is that people paid for an album they could have swiped for free.
Loosening the binds on music does not necessarily make it profitless.
(via CC blog)