Earlier this month Trent Reznor self released “Ghosts I - IV” on his website. For five bucks you can get all 36 tracks straight from the band, downloadable with no pesky DRM. He’s finally able to do this since breaking with his record label and striking out on his own.

So how did it work out? Well according to Wired he made US$ 1.6 million off 800,000 downloads in the first week alone. Not too shabby. This is despite the album being widely available on BitTorrent sites that Trent uploaded some of the tracks to himself.

Says Reznor, ““Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

The next step for the album is having fans create videos to go with the songs. These will be posted on Youtube with the best ones presented in a ‘virtual film festival’ presided over by Trent and some others fine folks.

Here’s one of the first submissions to Youtube for the film festival.

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