Trent Reznor reports on Saul Williams donation-project

While Radiohead revealed no real information about their donation–based album, Trent Reznor and Saul Williams have put together a detailed post–mortem of their free downloading experiment. To date, the album has "sold" 28,322 copies of 154,449 people who downloaded the record, so 18% of those downloading choose to pay. Compare this to Saul's last label–released album which sold 33,000 copies.

Trent notes:

Not one cent was spent on marketing this record. The only marketing was Saul and myself talking as loudly as we could to anybody that would listen. I have to assume the people knowing about this project must either be primarily Saul or NIN fans, as there was very little media coverage outside our direct influence.

Is it good news that less than one in five feel it was worth $5? I'm not sure what I was expecting but that percentage – primarily from fans – seems disheartening. But...
Saul's music in in more people's iPods than ever before and people are interested in him. He'll be touring throughout the year and we will continue to get the word out however we can.

With the lower profile of Saul Williams versus Radiohead, his experience is perhaps closer to the experience most artists would have.