Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon's MP3 store.

Decius wrote:

NIN wasn't always considered mainstream, but any way you slice it, a long, ambient industrial album like Ghosts I-IV is not pop music. Its amazing on a cultural level that this is the most popular MP3 album on Amazon. Is this really what people are listening to these days, or is this some sort of statistical anomaly?

If this isn't an anomaly, are people seeking out more ambient industrial music in general?

You should be able to answer this last question with publicly available sales data. For example, scan through the bestselling albums of 2008 (at Amazon) and see how many others you would consider "ambient industrial." I scanned through and saw none. There are some top-selling metal bands, including Metallica and Disturbed. But I don't see any of the top "industrial metal" or "industrial dance" artists on Amazon's list of top sellers.

This observation alone might be sufficient to explain NIN's sales numbers. There is a non-trivial population of the music-listening public who have developed an ear for industrial music, but at this point the offerings are few, so when something like Ghosts come along, these people say, "Hey, I like industrial, and I haven't bought a new industrial album in a while. I'll get this."

Decius asked:

Does the popularity of this sort of music reflect a dark undercurrent in American culture at the dawn of a serious economic cataclysm?

Bear in mind that you're looking (above) at the charts for "best-selling albums." The reality is that people aren't buying albums anymore, they're buying individual tracks. When you look at The Bestselling Songs of 2008, you see a happier story, with chart-toppers like "I Kissed A Girl", Madonna dance-floor numbers, "Pocketful Of Sunshine" (!!!), "I'm Yours", "The Time Of My Life", "Lollipop", "New Soul" (the Apple song), "Love In This Club", "I Will Possess Your Heart", "Touch My Body", and the like. And I think you'll find that the combined sales of happy-go-lucky tracks and love ballads far outweigh those dark, dreary album sales. You're into the 50's before you see Disturbed's single, and that's pretty much the only "heavy" thing I could find in the top 100 songs (although I was just scanning the list; I could have missed something).

As regards The Dark Knight, well ... I'll just say I was underwhelmed by its attempt at "intensity." I'd rather re-watch Nolan's early work: Following or Memento. For intensity, try Breaking the Waves. Or for an intensity of another kind, try Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille). Or still another: try Irréversible. When the masses are flocking to films like that, then you might have something to worry about.

Keep an ear on it, though, and be sure to send me a note if Trent should appear on The Today Show, playing a Friday morning concert in Rockefeller Plaza. For now, you can rest easily, as you watch the cheering hordes of Jonas Brothers fans pour into the Plaza.

noteworthy wrote:
Bear in mind that you're looking (above) at the charts for "best-selling albums." The reality is that people aren't buying albums anymore, they're buying individual tracks.

Interesting. I think this is at the heart of it. As ambient music Ghosts makes sense to listen to as an album. The individual songs aren't even really distinct in the sense that you'd want just one particular track. But most pop "albums" are just collections of distinct tracks... Real albums that have a cohesive artistic theme are rare. So naturally in this environment the "best-selling albums" will be the rare few that have a cohesive theme. The total sales for "best-selling album" may be far lower than than for "best-selling track." Perhaps the time approaches when "best-selling album" won't be a very interesting thing from a business standpoint, upheld mostly for historical reasons, although perhaps it will be a place to find decent art.