NIN did a Radiohead the other day, releasing their album (well, the first 9 tracks) for free.  When you go to the site and register, you receive an email with a download link.  The link is to a zip file, and the archive contains 9 MP3s encoded at 320kbps bitrate (which is very high).  In addition–and this is very cool–there is an extras folder which contains 11 large images suitable for desktop wallpaper.  They are provided in normal 4;3 ratio and widescreen format.  There’s also 22 images in various other sizes useful for putting on your website, like you see to the right.

If you click on the image, you’ll see the various options for ordering the album which include:

• $0 for 9 tracks in MP3 format
• $5 for the full 36 tracks in MP3 as well as FLAC & ALE formats
• $10 for 2-CD box set
• $75 deluxe edition which includes everything in multi-track format which you know the NIN fans love to remix, plus a Blu-ray disc
• And there was a $300 limited edition signed by Trent Reznor but all 2600 of them are already sold out.  Amazing.

I really don’t think you can consider this an experiment anymore.

I’m listening to the tracks now.  So far it’s instrumental.  I’m not sure if there are any lyrics at all.  Could be just the first volume (the 9 tracks) is all instrumental.  I’ll probably grab the $5 version later.