Nine Inch Nails have just released the first volume of their new album “ghosts i - iv” on several BitTorrent trackers for free. The release was such a success that it crashed their servers for a while:

The response to this album has been overwhelming, causing our website to slow to a crawl. We THOUGHT we were ready, but... We've been adding more servers to accommodate the unexpected demand and we expect to be running smoothly in the next few hours. In the meantime, if you've had any problems with downloads from the Ghosts site, don't worry - you'll be able to use your download link again when the site is more stable. Thanks everyone for making this such an immediate success.

Only the first volume, which is made up of the first nine tracks, is available for free. The entire album, comprised of 36 tracks, is available on Amazon's MP3 store digitally for $5 (high-quality, DRM-free formats). The album has been released under a Creative Commons license, and band leader Trent Reznor has seeded many BitTorrent trackers himself with the free songs.

The whole promotion was possible, among other things, because Nine Inch Nails have just ended their contract with their former record label.

Get your first 9 tracks here.

Industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails was founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio, and he remains the only official member of NIN. Two of their recordings won Grammy Awards, and the band has sold over twenty million albums worldwide, with more than 10 million in the United States alone.