Jun 26
11:45 AM
NIN’s “The Slip” Downloads Visualized in Google Earth
As we mentioned in last Friday’s post, we helped out a bit on downloads for Nine Inch Nails’ The Slip. We didn’t do much, simply hosted the file on our CDN for the first month or so (NIN has since taken this over themselves). But that did give some interesting data to play with, and our research scientist Eric Gottschalk mapped the data against the Google Earth API for a killer visualization of where NIN fans were located on the planet.
We sent this off to Trent for his enjoyment. Trent had Craig Johnston of Sudjam (the team that helps with NIN.com) run with the idea, make it pretty, and shared the result with his fans. Right on. Click here to Digg Trent’s post so the world sees it.
Thanks again, Trent. It’s a pleasure to have been involved in even the smallest of ways. Thanks for blazing the trail.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:01 PM
Soooo cool. Chalking that up as something else that I had already enjoyed on the NIN site without knowing the Topspin connection. Great stuff guys.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:11 PM
Totally rad! Love the visual.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:49 PM
It boggles my brain all the amazing capabilities of computers, the internet and the people that utilize it in awesome ways like this. Hey, can I buy some shares in your company?!
June 27th, 2008 at 11:21 AM
Awesome…..
June 28th, 2008 at 6:57 AM
[...] topspin posted this in [...]
June 28th, 2008 at 7:17 PM
This company is so false in their claims they had nothing to do with the development of the Nine Inch Nails Ghost project, Sudjam did the whole thing. Read Rolling Stone Magazine, listen to interveiws Trent has given. These clowns designed an inferiour product that was rejected by NIN and then are trying to capitalize on a lie, by attaching a screen shot of the Nine Inch Nails Ghost website. These guys are a glorified SnowCap. Lie Lie Lie…Nine Inch Nails…like I play in Led Zepplin.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:22 PM
Hi Steve,
Apologies for the delay in approving your comment. Others at the company didn’t think we should approve it, but I’d prefer not to censor comments on our blog. We don’t get to choose what people think of us, and only printing the good stuff is not the spirit of the Web IMHO.
Anyway, I’m sorry you feel that way.
Actually, we’ve gone out of our way to be accurate with respect to the self-described very small role we played in the Ghosts project. In fact, if you read my original post I say, “we had nothing to do with the front-end of those (incredible, inspiring, historic) promotions”. Additionally, check this compliment from my personal blog a few months back. I have tons of respect for what Trent (and Sudjam) have done; I don’t think anyone is doing a better job marketing their music at the moment. Note in the above post I encouraged people to Digg not my post, but Trent’s post. I corresponded with Trent as I was wrote this post and asked for his input specifically because I was looking to understand what had been done since we handed off our file and I didn’t want to steal anyone’s thunder. Thankfully it seems Trent sees the value in what we’re working on given the kind words he added to the post after our correspondence.
But the truth is we did step in and offer up our CDN (which is LimeLight-backed) when the Ghosts servers couldn’t take the load. It wasn’t that big a deal at all, but it does show that we’re investing in the infrastructure necessary to handle many large-scale releases. In our opinion it doesn’t make sense for any one artist to invest in this kind of infrastructure. Sure, anyone can pay for a CDN like LimeLight or Akamai, but since the traffic for a promotion like this has spikes right around release time and then tapers off to low levels it isn’t really cost-effective for a single artist to make that investment. Topspin can make the investment, amortize it across many many artists, watch the price decrease as our overall volume increases, and since we are transparent about bandwidth costs with our bands (and we do not mark it up at all) we can pass that savings along directly to the bands.
And, we did (unprompted) send Trent that data mapped against Google Earth because we thought it was cool. We don’t mind a bit he asked Sudjam to run with it. I put this post up because we wanted to draw more attention to it. I was concerned enough with being accurate in the post that I ran it by Trent first, and I added the specifics about Sudjam when Jeff sent them to me. Sincere apologies if I misled anyone, I went out of my way to tell the truth in both this post and the post from last Friday. Like I said above, “Thanks again, Trent. It’s a pleasure to have been involved in even the smallest of ways. Thanks for blazing the trail.”
Re: your comment that we’re “a glorified Snocap”, I’m looking forward to proving you wrong. Snocap started off as a rights registration application for P2P services and then moved into the come-one-come-all $0.99 digital distribution space. I followed them closely from my post at Yahoo!. From inception Topspin has been more about demand creation than demand fulfillment, and our charter is to build sophisticated marketing tools, not yet-another digital distribution platform. We give artists far more flexibility with their business model than just a $0.99 download store, plus the tools they need to maintain a close, trusted, measurable relationship with their fans. And there’s much more to come. But I understand the criticism, I was expecting it, which is why I included the “one point I want to make clear” paragraph in my original post.
Thanks for caring enough to leave the comment. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.
ian
June 30th, 2008 at 12:12 PM
[...] [8] TOPSPIN. NIN’s “The Slip” Downloads Visualized in Google Earth. [en línea]. [consultado 30 de jun. de 2008]. Disponible en <http://topspinmedia.com/2008/06/nins-the-slip-downloads-visualized-in-google-earth/> [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 11:52 AM
Nice data ! Great project. Very informative. A++++++