In March 2008, Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails released the first part of Ghosts I-IV via BitTorrent, and released all four albums under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Even though fans could easily get free versions of the album, Ghosts actually went on to become the best-selling album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

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Radiohead's In Rainbows, another high-profile album which was available for free for a limited time in late 2007, ended the year just outside of Amazon's Top 10 for 2008.

Why Pay for Free Music?

Trent Reznor himself questioned the viability ...