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Re: [microsound] nin



On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 07:15:10PM -0400, Paulo Mouat wrote:
> How about the free marketing and exposure to potential new users that
> otherwise would never try NIN out? It seems that the virtual release
> in no way affected the real release of NIN's previous album (much to
> the contrary, it seems) so the question really is why not?
> 

I've been lurking on this list for a while, but I have been researching and thinking about this particular issue a lot and I figured now's a good time to jump in.

I went to that link, which requires a *working* email address in order to download the album. And this seemed meaningful to me-- and a very smart thing to do.

Back during the dot-com boom, I spent my days as a marketing puke, managing a direct mail team at a major network-technology corporation. Our goal was the acquisition and maintenance of a database of current and potential customers, and harvesting it for picking up sales leads. Our main tool in this effort was giving away "FREE!!!" stuff in order to obtain people's emails, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. We discovered that "FREE CD!!" was the most effective way to get people to respond to our nefarious mailings, and we built up a respectable database using targetted offers like that.

I suspect that Mr. Reznor might be building a fan database. These email addresses he's collecting could be very useful for sending offers of hard-copy CD's for sale, concert tickets, T-shirts, and the like.

Although I'd guess that's perhaps secondary to the more obvious motivations mentioned here already, such as the normal human urge to show off and have your music heard by others, and to maintain total creative control over it, coupled with the fact that major label artists are already accustomed to seeing little to no profit from CD sales in the first place anyway.

-ken

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