Ghosts I–IV (2008)

Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder · 2008 · 110 min

Ten weeks in the autumn of 2007, no label, no lyrics, no plan beyond "a soundtrack for daydreams": thirty-six numbered instrumentals that go from piano sketches to industrial grind to something close to ambient, and the record that proved a band could walk out of the major-label system and simply hand the work over. Reznor put it on the internet on a Sunday morning under a Creative Commons license, with the first nine tracks free and the rest for five dollars if you wanted them from him — and then the whole thing here, on the Internet Archive, in lossless, uploaded by the band. It won a Grammy nomination and sold a quarter of a million copies of something anyone could have for nothing, which told the industry more than any op-ed did.

The music is better than its business story. Ghosts II is the one to start with — the marimba-and-static pieces (14 Ghosts II, 19 Ghosts III) became the sound of a decade of film trailers — but the album is meant to be played through, and its numbering is the only title it needs. Nearly two hours.

Chosen copy: the band's own release on the Internet Archive, item nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV, uploaded 2008-03-11 within days of the 2008-03-02 release — 36 FLAC files, one per track, contiguously numbered (01_Ghosts_I.flac … 36_Ghosts_IV.flac), 611 MB, 1 h 50 min. The item also carries the band's 320 kbps MP3 set, three cover images and the 40-page PDF booklet; the torrent takes the FLAC set, the lossless master being the release (the size guard applies the same rule).

Checked against the 36-track listing before staging: no gaps, no duplicates, running order correct once sorted. Higher-resolution versions exist in the collection (a 24-bit/48 kHz set and the Blu-ray 24/96 rip) and are the natural upgrade path; the multitrack stems are a different product.

One layer, the artist's own license — composition and recording are Reznor's and the license covers both:

• The license. Ghosts I–IV was released 2008-03-02 under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States; the Archive.org item carries that license URL and the band's own description states it. You may download, keep, seed and share this album freely and forever, and rework it under the same license. You may not sell copies or use it commercially — that term is the band's, and it is passed through here unchanged.
• Provenance. The item's uploader is the label that handled the European release and the files are the band's own encodes, released the same week; this is the drop the license was attached to, not a fan rip.

Nine Inch Nails, Ghosts I–IV (2008), released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US