It’s a digital world and as people turn towards digital music, so do artists as it appears. First there was Radiohead, who just last year made their “In Rainbows” album available over the Internet in an unusual manner: pay as much as you want for the album… well, that certainly didn’t prove to be lucrative, but it was worth the try.

This year, it’s Nine Inch Nail’s turn to repay their fans, by making 9 of the 36 tracks on the ‘Ghosts: I – IV’ album available via Internet, only this time, for free and on BitTorrent, a Web site that enables users to download free, unauthorized media files with absolutely no restrictions.

The question is: will the strategy work? It’s been only a couple of days since the release of the album, and the BitTorrent servers crashed, overwhelmed with the demand.

“The response to this album has been overwhelming, causing our website to slow to a crawl. We thought we were ready, but... We've been adding more servers to accommodate the unexpected demand and we expect to be running smoothly in the next few hours,” were the comments after the servers crashed.

That could be a good sign, at least for the beginning, but it still doesn’t answer our question: how good of a strategy is this?

“Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them,” the band wrote in a blog.

The step Nine Inch Nails made was a surprising, but fan-appealing move, under what they called Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, which allows the share and remix of their tracks as long as they respect three major conditions: attribute the work to the author, use it for noncommercial purposes and further distribution under the same conditions.