Nine Inch Nail’s Ghosts I-IV is the Amazon’s Bestselling album of 2008! Ghosts was released last March under a Creative Commons license: allowing anyone to legally copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. The first nine tracks of the album were, and still are, available for download on the band’s site. So despite the fact that Ghosts could be legally downloaded (Trent Reznor himself even uploaded the album to bittorrent sites), it is shocking that it was able to sell so many copies on Amazon.

Here are some possibilities for why Ghosts might have done so well:

• The reasonable $5.00 album price for 36 tracks?
• The immense publicity surrounding this free release last March?
• The band’s reputation?

Further, I would be curious if Amazon’s data is based on units sold or total earnings? But even if the $5.00 album price is responsible for selling a greater number of units, similarly interesting is Radiohead’s In Rainbows coming in at #11 ($8.99 for 10 tracks).