Honestly, how many of you thought: “Wow, Nine Inch Nails is cool!” after 9 of their 36 tracks on the ‘Ghost: I – IV’ album became available for free on BitTorrent? Well, you can say that again! The band thanked its fans for the unconditional support over the years with the full-length Nine Inch Nails record “The Slip,” again for free.

The 44 minute album is available for download exclusively via nin.com and is made up of 10 songs, including “Echoplex” and “Discipline” which the band made available via their iLike page prior to the album release.

“As a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new Nine Inch Nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com,” the band said on May 5 on their official website.

The tracks will be available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE, everything for free, and with a PDF with artwork and credits included for every download.

“For those of you interested in physical products, fear not. We plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in July. Details coming soon,” the band also said.

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.

This year, it was 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. The consequences: in only a couple of days after the release of the album, the BitTorrent servers crashed, overwhelmed with the demand.

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.