Trent Reznor's penchant for experimentation, both sonic and otherwise, continued today with the online release of a new Nine Inch Nails album called Ghosts I-IV.

The 36-song instrumental album is being offered on the official NIN site at a number of price points, following in the footsteps of Radiohead's innovative, name-your-price release of its In Rainbows album in 2007.

The Ghosts site is offering the album's first nine songs as DRM-free MP3s for free, along with a 40-page PDF book, and a digital extras pack with wallpapers, icons, and more.

But as a test to see if fans will pay for the music in multiple formats and with extra features, Reznor is also selling the album as a $5 digital download, a $10 double-CD set, a $75 package that includes two CDs, a DVD, and a Blue-ray disc, and a limited edition, $300 autographed edition that adds a four-LP vinyl version to the $75 package.

Fans can preview Ghosts through an embeddable flash player (see below). It will also be released as a traditional album through Sony BMG's Red Octane label.

"I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature, it wouldn't have made sense until this point," Reznor said on the site. "This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective--dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I'm very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts."

The first nine songs of Ghosts have also been uploaded to BitTorrent file-sharing sites.

"Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label," the band said in a statement, "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."

For Reznor, this is the latest in what appears to be an ongoing effort to experiment with digital distribution and technology.

For NIN's 2007 album Year Zero, Reznor filled USB flash-drives with songs that users could upload to file-sharing sites and had street teams drop the drives in bathrooms at concerts in the US and Europe. In an odd turn of events, the song leaks drew the legal wrath of the Recording Industry Association of America until it realized that the leaks came from Reznor himself.

Saul Williams' 2007 album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which Reznor produced and helped bankroll, was released both as a free download and as a $5 higher quality version.

The release yielded mixed results, with the free download allowing Williams to reach a far greater number of people than he would have otherwise, but less than 40,000 people paying for the high-fidelity version.

Preview Ghosts I-IV: