The Best-Selling MP3 Album of 2008 ... was free

NIN’s CC-Licensed Ghosts I-IV was Amazon's Best-Selling MP3 Album for 2008: "NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks?"

Because Amazon is so easy to use? I don't buy that argument if only because the payment transaction itself is several screens long. The only answer left says the NiN fans were assured far more of the (reasonable price) $5 they spent would go straight to their idols, coupled with their just wanting to be a part of the hyped temporal happening of it all.

Curiously, or maybe not curious at all, there is a lot of freely trade-friendly file-shared artists in the Amazon lists.