So Trent Reznor released another album today online. (Here is a post about the last one.) The music sounds really good so far, but this post is about how impressed I am by his web presence. From a usability perspective, it’s just the perfect method of distributing music. And behind the scenes, Trent and his web designers are elegantly balancing a number of other factors.

• First of all, the music is free. As he writes on his blog, “this one’s on me.” In exchange for your email address, you get sent an email link (expires in an hour) which you click to get to the download page. By doing it this way, he’s ensuring that people submit actual email addresses, and that they don’t forward the emails around (much).
• Beyond that, he’s distributing the parts of his music as well, encouraging people to remix the tracks at his extensive remix site. I don’t know of any other artist that’s doing that so successfully.
• Furthermore, he’s giving you several
  download quality options, which are exactly the options people want (see below).
• The method of download rocks: if you choose the V0, you get a ZIP file, which makes it easy for most users. Other formats are .torrent, which is a P2P method that eases the bandwidth on his server and doesn’t compress the high-quality music files.
• And finally there’s no Digital Rights Management (here’s what happens when you buy music with DRM).

Here are the options that I’m so impressed with (quoting from the download page):

From 1990-94 I thought that NIN was just the coolest thing. These days I still do, but for new reasons!