Cool news: The best-selling MP3 album at Amazon in 2008 was Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV, which was released free under a Creative Commons license.
The album made more than $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboards Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.
The Creative Commons blog notes:
NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazons MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.
The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.
