CNET News posted a great interview with Trent Reznor, the front man for Nine Inch Nails. Reznor recently collaborated with Saul Williams on an album called The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust and sold it online.

To Reznor's disappointment, less than one in five customers paid the requested $5 for the album, which was only available online.

He spends the interview talking a lot about the different ways to sell music, a potential "tax" with ISPs that subsidizes music and then delivers it to everyone for free, and some other ideas. To us it looks like the solution is to force people to pay, rather than letting them grab it for free, but then to leave it unprotected (i.e. without DRM), similar to the way the Amazon MP3 store works. But check it out and see what you think; it gets at the core of the problem with the music industry today.

Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5? [CNET News]