Giving away your content free doesn’t mean you can’t make a living as a writer, musician or artist.

Just ask Nine Inch Nails. Their Ghosts I-IV album, which was released free under the Creative Commons license, was rated the bestselling Amazon mp3 Album of 2008.

Take a moment to think about the significance: NIN’s Ghost I-IV is given away for free, but it sold the most albums online at Amazon.

Taken from this Creative Commons blog posting:

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 Amazon’s 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.

Some interesting background:

• Ghosts I–IV was released online on March 2, 2008 on the official Nine Inch Nails website, without any prior advertisement or notice.
• According to Chicago Tribune, a week after the album’s release, the official Nine Inch Nails site reported over 750,000 purchase and download transactions, amassing over US$1.6 million in sales. Pre-orders of the $300 “Ultra-Deluxe Limited Edition” sold out in less than three days of its release, according to Ars Technica.
• Said Trent Reznor, NIN’s frontman, on the Creative Commons license on Potent Quotables early in March this year: “It’s a stance we’re taking that we feel is appropriate… with digital technology, and outdated copyright laws, and all the nonsense that’s going on these days”.

Thanks to The Long Tail for the idea for this story.

We’ve moved Techgoondu’s content to the Creative Commons 3.0 License (Singapore).

This basically means that as long as you attribute to the source (i.e.Techgoondu), feel free to copy and mash-up any of the content here as you see fit. You can see this license on our front page on the right-hand sidebar.

Why are we doing this?

We’re not deluded enough to think our content is popular enough that it will run into some legal issues over copyright. Far from it. In fact if you take stuff, we’ll be more than flattered.

The whole exercise is more about making a point: content like this should be free, and we are stating upfront we have no issues with that, now and in the future.

Call it a reaction to our backgrounds in media, where “content protection” is the norm. That is not the way the world is heading, and not the way we believe information should be handled. Many of us here at Techgoondu are open source advocates anyway, so we should walk-the-talk, so to speak.

Besides, the site was set up on passion to find an alternative tech voice outside our work, and profit is not on our high list of priorities for Techgoondu.

If you have a good tech blog in Singapore, we’d love to RSS feed your content in a sidebar on our site. I believe it serves the Singaporean readers out there better. Drop us an email.

Thanks to this Tech65.org post for sparking this idea.