Slashdot Mirror
Reznor Follows Radiohead, Offers Free Album
An anonymous reader writes "Convinced the current music business infrastructure (requiring artists to rely on labels) is broken, Nine Inch Nails front man, Trent Reznor, released his band's new album, Ghosts I — IV (Ghosts Volumes One though Four), on Sunday at 6 PM via his official site, marking yet another business experiment for this artist in the changing music market."
The team: Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder and myself with some help from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew and Brian Viglione. Rob Sheridan collaborated with Artist in Residence (A+R) to create the accompanying visual and physical aesthetic.
We began improvising and let the music decide the direction. Eyes were closed, hands played instruments and it began. Within a matter of days it became clear we were on to something, and a lot of material began appearing. What we thought could be a five song EP became much more. I invited some friends over to join in and we all enjoyed the process of collaborating on this.
The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we're able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed - from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download, to the most luxurious physical package we've ever created.
More volumes of Ghosts are likely to appear in the future.
- Trent Reznor, March 2, 2008 For those of you that don't like the same sounding music on an album or the yelling vocals, I heavily recommend downloading this and listening to it for free. I emphasized the "wildly varied" as some of this music is very cool calm and collected easy listening with very orchestral sounding builds.
I'm glad to see an artist as respected as Reznor do this. It kind of makes sense though, as you see this music only took him 10 weeks to do and doesn't have any vocals--lowering the number of takes and the difficulty of quality lyrics.
With the digital age and the ability to produce easily and quickly accessible DRM free music, we may see the beginning of a whole lot more material coming from artists with either an ad-based revenue or charging for particular tracks that required more studio time and refinement.
My work here is dung.
To clarify, only the first 9 songs are available for free. The rest are still available a price well below what you could get anywhere legal.
Radiohead didn't come up with this idea. Harvey Danger did it back in 2005 and they probably aren't the first. Here's the Slashdot article:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/02/2056210
Anyway, this NIN album is very good. If you're anxious for it and the NIN servers are still too slow, Amazon's MP3 service has it for $5. Amazon finally released a Linux version of the downloader, btw.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
He actually did torrent the free as in beer sampler (9 tracks). Please don't slashdot the site if you just want to check the sampler out.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4059158/Nine_Inch_Nails_-_Ghosts_I_(2008)
The full 36 tracks are 5$. And are licensed under creativecommons for non-commercial copy/share/perform.
You could check out Machinae Supremacy, Swedish band. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinae_supremacy
Lots of free songs on their website, which is of course under reconstruction now when I checked it...
c++;
I second the Machinae Supremacy recommendation.
... in fact, find Industrial Legacy vol 1 on the Pirate Bay. I bought 12 CDs because I found that mix, I think all except one were on a small record label.
If you want something a little different, try some post-industrial music -- e.g. Combichrist, Funker Vogt,
At the moment, I can buy CDs from Americans on Amazon Marketplace for about £6, the price of two drinks in a bar in London, and they arrive in about two weeks. In the mean time, I'll listen to the download.
Uhm, I always find that there are really a lot of interesting metal bands that are NOT on any major label... try Nuclear Blast, or Century Media. Non-RIAA, and a wide range of metal bands from all styles.
Yes, I think most of their fans disliked their signing to Spinefarm, but that doesn't change that all or most of the songs before 2006 was distributed through their website, in mp3 and ogg formats.
I think they said that their reason for signing with Spinefarm was that it was their only way to be able to get a gig at the big music festivals in Sweden, apparently they don't take on bands that are not on a label, even if they have a large fanbase.
c++;
I am a bit of a NIN fan...
I went to the site, paid $16.99 for an immediate download of all 36 tracks and the promise of the 2-disc CD set mailed to me in April. The download site is totally swamped. I tried to download the music, my downloads would just die before I even got a few percent of the archive. I tried again, then again, and now it hates me: "download limit exceeded." Hopefully, they'll get their shit together, unblock my access, and I'll be able to get the music I paid for.
The moral of this story is: "You might want to wait a couple days before trying to download."
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
We've been adding more servers to accommodate the unexpected demand and we expect to be running smoothly in the next few hours. In the meantime, if you've had any problems with downloads from the Ghosts site, don't worry - you'll be able to use your download link again when the site is more stable. Thanks everyone for making this such an immediate success.
posted by Trent Reznor at 5:47 PM pst, from hong kong.