Nine Inch Nails and why you should love your customers

Posted by Mal Chia on May 29th, 2009 at 10:07am

Nine Inch Nails are a band that really loves its fans. Or at the very least knows how to treat them and still turn a profit.

While the rest of the music industry struggles to find ways to keeping exploiting their audience and largely ignore the existence of digital, NiN have been pioneering a new model for how bands should interact with their fans.

The last few years has seen the band embark on a wildly successful multi-platform marketing strategy. In addition to giving away (or at least, “selling cheaply”) several really good albums and hours of live HD video footage, the Year Zero viral campaign and an impressively ambitious iPhone app are just two examples of how they have leveraged digital channels to create a deep personal relationship with their fans.

Instead of making money off the music (like everyone else), they are using that and everything else as free publicity to promote themselves and make money from concerts and selling specialty products (e.g. limited edition CDs). As NiN band leader Trent Reznor said in an interview with Wired,

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free. But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

Nine Inch Nails iPhone App Extends Reznor’s Innovative Run