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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
You should have seen the faces of the band!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Funny that Trent should do it, he was a regular at a nightclub in Chicago over a decade ago that I was a part owner in, and used to scream about the record label monopoly even back then. Wonder if he ever remembers it...
I've helped a few bands over the years break free from relying on the distributor monopoly by providing their easily-copied material for free, while providing hard to copy material at great cost (or higher cost). Bands should make their big money by providing the hardest to mimic items at the higher cost, and the easy to mimic items at a lower cost.
The hardest to mimic? Playing live. This is where bands should make their money -- performing for fans. Those of us who are not musicians make our money, generally, by ongoing work. We don't get paid for previous work (often), we get paid for current and future work. Bands should be no different.
Trent has a unique set of prices on his site: $5 for a download, $10 for a CD+download, $300 for a CD, 180gram LPs, a DVD with 36 tracks of each song (to remix), and a giclee printbook. Great idea. The multitrack DVD idea I came up with many years ago for bands to release to fans to remix. David Crowder Band is one band that did this to great acclaim (and even released a few of his fans' remixes).
Trent is ahead of the game. I'm prebuying the $300 kit because I want to support Trent's ideas, music, and astounding insight into why the RIAA and other monopolists have no place in the new digital world. If it can be copied easily, the price should fall to near zero. If it can't be copied easily, the limited supply should dictate the price based on whatever the demand level is. Supply and demand, the most important aspect of a market economy.
This is NO experiment for Trent, this is his step into the correct version of the current music market. He doesn't need monopolized distribution from the RIAA, he has distribution. Even small bands are doing just fine distributing their music via iTunes, and touring, touring, touring. Selling t-shirts (which can be copied, but are a hassle to do a dozen cheaply), giving away hundreds of stickers for fans' cars (cheap), selling albums (LPs, impossibly expensive to duplicate), signing posters, and other options are a great way to provide a consistent income. Touring just 8 months a year, a few bands I've consulted with are already pushing nearly $50k per year per member in profit. Yes, it is hard work. Isn't what you're doing hard work, too?
For a start, they're not going to get tons of free publicity. Plenty of musicians already release their music for free, without expecting any payment. They don't get articles in slashdot. If lots of other musicians "catch on" they'll find the whole "band releases album on net" story is long past stale, no-one cares, and hundreds, never mind millions, aren't going to be made.
Users couldn't figure out how to decrypt it until they figured out that the music was suppose to sound like that.
ok, bad joke. I've got a bad case of the Mondays.
Lots of those musicians (some of which I know personally or I bought a cd of them) don't play commercially either. They go to school and/or work and in their free time they make some high quality (good) music. If you buy their CD's direct, usually they'll throw in another CD or some other merchandise for free.
That's the way (in my opinion) music and a lot of other art should be made. In their free time while they also have a job either in or out the artistic/music business. If they are successful enough to live off the revenue generated from concerts and other stuff they make (if they're very successful) all the better for them, but at least THEY made it and you know they are good quality unlike the crap that is pushed now, some poor chap thinks he can sing and with a few hundreds of thousands in corporate backing he/she is promoted to death.
As soon as independent music starts to catch on, the radio stations will have to follow. Who'll listen to a radio station that has only some RIAA-promoted garbage on it while there are other sources that play high(er) quality music? It'll take a time but my last CD purchase from a promoted label was in 1999 and I know quite some people that do the same so next generation might be better off than us.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Well if that happened, there would be no reason not to switch to Linux. People say they use Windows because it costs money and therefore has value, while Linux is given away and therefore is worthless.
TFSummary (and TFA) leaves out the most important part about this news: that the album is free as in freedom, not just free as in beer. It's released under a creative commons license, which means that he (or the **AA) can't go after you if you share the album online. AFAIK, this is the first high-profile album release under a CC license (I don't believe Radiohead's was under a CC license).
I was the first child in my household and the soundtrack was non-stop Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and the Carpenters. I didn't even know how awful it was, until I was old enough to have friends with musical taste. I'm just damned lucky it didn't drive me to suicide.
Ask me about my sig!
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.