Trent Reznor did it again. After giving away their last Album "Ghosts" away almost for free. NIN has now released their newest album "The Slip" under a Creative Commons license. Encouraging all fans to remix the tracks! On the band’s official website Trent Reznor writes:

(thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one's on me)

So obviously he was quite happy with the support of the last album. According to golem.de it sold pretty well, and brought a revenue of 1.600.000 USD after two weeks time.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 16:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Following Radiohead’s example last year, who released their latest album online, Nine Inch Nails put out their new record up for download yesterday. The first nine tracks of the instrumental album called "Ghosts" is available for free download in DRM-free mp3 format. The whole album can be bought as a digital release for the bargain price of 5$. Also different hard-copy releases will bei available for fans relying on physical media.

Trent Reznor describes the album as a "soundtrack for daydreams", each track has his own album art supporting the mood created by the track. Reznor also states, that he has been planing an album like this since years, but it took him up to now, to be able to do it. Probably the new distribution strategy is part of his plans. Tracks of the album are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Comercial-Share Alike License. So fans are encouraged to create there own remixes of the tracks. The initial work of NIN is just a starting point to elaborate on those given impressions.

This has been possible due to the breaking free of NIN's contract with their recording company. Now NIN holds the rights to their new works exclusively, and therefor can use them as they like. In the past there already has been a quarrel about a planned remix page by NIN. The innovative project was stopped due to the danger of lawsuits. I think this is a good example for "copyright-kills-music".

In my opinion Radiohead and NIN are examples for the new upcoming modell of music distribution. To a certain grade recording companies have been rendered useless. Well known artists can set up their own distribution, where unknown artists gain there popularity through social distribution using myspace and other networks.

The official homepage for thise album seems to be down due to overwhelming response of the fans. The free version of the album can be download via Bittorent here. NIN even posted a statement additional to this official torrent:

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.

Very remarkable. So be encouraged to download the album there. If you like it, get the full electronic version for 5$ at the official web-site when it's back up!

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Media at 15:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

As mentioned before the Nine Inch Nails were booked headlining for the Frequency festival. But they had a very hard stand. The organizers gave them the next to last slot at the main stage on the 2nd day (starting 10:30pm). Generally this is not a bad slot– prime time at the evening, main stage with room for a lot of crowd, not too late – so the crowd shouldn’t be completely exhausted. But due to some unfortunate circumstances it ended in a scandal.

The slot was between the two German bands “Beatsteaks” and “Die Ärzte”, those two bands share a lot of fans. One reason for the Beatsteaks success was advertising of “Die Ärzte”, who referred to the Beatstakes in on of their songs. Also both German bands play German punk rock, where NIN’s style is American industrial rock from that point of view, they would have been far more compatible with Interpol (they are doing American indie rock). But Interpol was put into a similar slot trapped between two other German bands (“Jan Delay” and “Freundeskreis”) at the second stage.

Plenty of people attended the Beatsteaks’ concert, who afterwards stayed in the front rows waiting for Die Ärzte, without any interest in the performance of NIN. Even worse, a lot of them was not open minded enough to take the NIN performance and started chants demanding Die Ärzte on stage (“Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen! Wir wollen die Ärzte sehen!”. So the atmosphere got really screwed. NIN lead Trent Reznor commented the show

“the worst performance and certainly the worst crowd of the whole tour by far.”

in his official tour blog. This was a very annoying situation for all fans of harder music, who already had to cope with the canceled performance of Tool the day before.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in Event at 17:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)