NIN Releases Album Download Details via Google Earth

Band gets their "computer wizard" to show where in the world the more than one million people who downloaded "The Slip" come from.

NIN continues to be head and shoulders above all other bands when it comes to embracing digital distribution and technology. It was not the first to try out donation-based album downloading, but it certainly has tried out everything in between.

It's released part of an album on BitTorrent for fans to check out and pique interest on the remainder. It's even offered a free digital tour sampler so that people can know what to expect when they buy a ticket.

Even better is that it offered it's last album "The Slip" as a free download to thank fans for their "continued and loyal support over the years." It was this endeavor that spurred their latest project which was to take the data and load it into Google Earth so that people could see a geographical representation of where the most album downloaders are from.

You can even zoom in and select number of downloaders in a given city.

From their site:

Anyway, our computer wizards presented some data to us in an interesting way and we thought we'd share it with you. CLICK HERE to download a Google Earth KML file representing downloads of our latest record The Slip according to geographic region. We've had just over 1,400,000 people download The Slip from our site since its release May 5th (that number represents individual people, and excludes multiple downloads from the same order), and this map displays ONLY downloads that came directly from us.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the eastern coast of the US and Europe seem to be where the most action occurred.

It's also cool to hear that 1.4 million people downloaded the album. This is a sign that NIN is still as popular and I'm sure that making sure fans know that they are always numero uno in their book helps a great deal.