Slashdot Mirror
Trent Reznor Says "Steal My Music"
THX-1138 writes "A few months ago, Trent Reznor (frontman of the band Nine Inch Nails), was in Australia doing an interview when he commented on the outrageous prices of CDs there. Apparently now his label, Universal Media Group is angry at him for having said that. During a concert last night, he told fans, '...Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means — STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that's not right.'"
This was during a concert, not an interview. A YouTube clip of him talking about it.
If you've followed his career at all, you'd know his current record contract exists only because he had no other choice.
He was using his own label -- Nothing Records -- to publish his music. He never liked working with the big labels. However, while he was going through some pretty destructive drug use after The Fragile, his partner essentially took the money from Nothing Records and ran. Trent woke up and found himself with no money and no way to make money.
He signed a multi-album deal to get him enough money to be independent again, but he has become increasingly disgusted by the practices of the label (double dipping by charging Trent to do the color shifting ink label and then still charing the customer more, etc.). IIRC, he's got one album left and then he's free. I'd expect it to be released sometime in 2008 or early 2009, depending on how profitable his tour is. He wants out ASAP.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Actually, until 2005 Trent was running Nothing, his own Label and Studio. And given his attitude to the industry (the record industry, not the musicians), and his past affinity for the internet and viral marketing, it would not be surprising to see him go to a fully independent internet only distribution system and start a new label once his contractual obligations to Interscope are done.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
He's right though, CD prices are still too high. An extreme example is in Malaysia, a I looked at some CDs, and they costed 45 ringit, which is about $15. Normal price for an American. But if you consider that an average Malaysians make 3 times less than an American, then a 45 ringit CD to a Malaysian is like $45 to an American. Now, who the hell is going to pay $45 for a CD????
Don't forget he has to pay for studio time, so make that 13 cents per CD (that's a very good deal, as these things go) minus $200,000 for each project.
How's the math on that?
-Nathan
PS:I'm sure trent has built his own studio by now and has engineers lapping at his johnson to work on his stuff. But still. I bet the studio cost a couple million.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
At his Year Zero site: http://yearzero.nin.com/
At the bottom of the page, under "Multitrack Audio Files"
Garage Band style on the left or Raw WAV's on the right.
I'm told he took a long break from recording after Pretty Hate Machine until his record contract expired because he didn't like the terms he signed. No love for the system from that guy.
Here is the wiki section on his issues with the cooperate world:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Inch_Nails#Corporate_entanglements
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Pretty Hate Machine came out in 1989. Somewhere in the past 18 years I'd imagine it recouped it's production costs. Could you imagine software made in 1989 being sold at original retail today?
Major label payout at 10%
Wholesale price: $9 / 90 cents per CD = $90,000.00
Selling as independent artist and Amazon(tm) Partner
Staff member to mail packages: $30,000 per year
Cost per CD, printing: $1
Cost per CD, packaging and mailing: $4
Cost per year: $530,000 on revenues of ($15 CD) $1.5m
Net: $1m
Going indie is not just more trendy, it's more profitable, once you've already got that mega-media marketing machine convincing 100,000 people they need to buy your (mediocre) music.
technical writing / development
Trent is in a contract with his label to put out a certain number of albums through them before he can break away and do his own thing.
In the interview that was mentioned in the topic (http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,21741980-5006024,00.html), he says:
(Interviewer): Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
I've have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it's done in the studio, not this "Let's wait three months" bulls---.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
NiN is a Big Deal & could easily start their own label and do whatever they damn well please.
They (or rather he) did - Nothing Records. Then it went bankrupt (sounds like a partner took advantage of him, i don't really know the story though) so now having far fewer financial resources he resorted to going back to the big label for a contract. A contract he's not going to be able to get out of soon. In the meantime, he's pissing off his corporate masters which is exactly what I would expect.
The enemies of Democracy are
Ehum. I just "reduced my noise floor" to -90db (that's almost zero) with behringer eurorack ub, t.bone condenser mics, and a behringer firewire audio interface. This cost me about 200 euros.
Digital recording and leaps in mic pregain circuit design has made noise-free audio easy to attain.
While I was just testing, I got some odd noise on the meters and got worried. I cranked up the pregains and recorded the noise to find out where it comes from. Ended up being my laptops cooler. I was picking that up from 4 meters away and there was no foreign noise when I listened to it.
All studios are using DAW's nowadays. Only _must have_ expensive equipment is mixing table, room acoustics and monitoring speakers. Even the mixing table is primarily used for routing and grouping for the A/D interface.
And, uh, in conclusion. Your point is valid.
It's just that building a studio isn't as expensive as it used to be, so no point paying $200/h when you could get your own adequate one for couple of grand.
Bot Assisted Blogging
You are losing sight of the original point TR is raising. Prices in AUSTRALIA are stupidly high. His original rant (back in May) was when he found out that his album was priced at AU$32 (US$17.50) while generic top40 fluff was sold at AU$21. The reason given by the record company (UA) was that his fans would pay that price, so they will sell it high. The video is him continuing that rant. Australian prices hadn't dropped (RRP) and as he found in China, his music was damn near impossible to find apart from pirate copies sold in markets. In those cases (prices artificially inflated or items not available) he said to download it free. That you can pre-order in the US for a cheap price means nothing to the argument. You either have to wait a few weeks for the item to be sent, or pay extra for priority airmail (negating the cheap price anyway). If you can buy any CD cheap, cool. But some of us do get ripped off just because we aren't in the good ol' USA.