you see your world on fire / don't try to act surprised
Some very cool news from Trent Reznor:
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed. (via Ed)
I've blogged previously about Trent's awesomeness, and this is indeed exciting news. He's often commented about studio pressures impinging on his artistic vision (oddly similar to Poppy Z. Brite's relationship with Three Rivers Press), and of the actions taken specifically counter to his promotion of Year Zero (as part of the ARG associated with the album, he purposefully leaked mp3s of songs from the album before its release, both online and on thumb drives planted in the toilets of NIN concert venues, with the express purpose of P2P sharing, and his label stupidly sent cease-and-desist notices to the sharers).
Ed notes:
With Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead now operating without record contracts, perhaps the music industry might want to reconsider precisely how it conducts business. The artists and the listeners are not the enemies. The industry’s continued litigation towards online music listeners, the industry’s sustained avarice towards artists locked into unfair contracts, and the industry’s failure to embrace inevitability collectively suggest that we may very well be witnessing a remarkable revolution that may well knock the remaining wind out of record companies.
Other less well-known bands have already gone this route and begun selling directly to their fans -- Royal Crown Revue and Collective Soul are two that immediately come to mind, not to mention the legions of bands who give their music away on their websites and on MySpace -- but the fact that two huge players like Radiohead and NIN are no longer willing to play the record companies' game is a huge defection. I don't completely agree with Ed's assessment, but I sincerely hope that the company executives get their heads out of their asses and stop treating their customers as criminals. They're losing millions of dollars on their petty little RIAA crusades, and it's produced nothing but ill will toward them. It's time for a sea change, and we may be seeing its emergence.
Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed. (via Ed)
I've blogged previously about Trent's awesomeness, and this is indeed exciting news. He's often commented about studio pressures impinging on his artistic vision (oddly similar to Poppy Z. Brite's relationship with Three Rivers Press), and of the actions taken specifically counter to his promotion of Year Zero (as part of the ARG associated with the album, he purposefully leaked mp3s of songs from the album before its release, both online and on thumb drives planted in the toilets of NIN concert venues, with the express purpose of P2P sharing, and his label stupidly sent cease-and-desist notices to the sharers).
Ed notes:
With Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead now operating without record contracts, perhaps the music industry might want to reconsider precisely how it conducts business. The artists and the listeners are not the enemies. The industry’s continued litigation towards online music listeners, the industry’s sustained avarice towards artists locked into unfair contracts, and the industry’s failure to embrace inevitability collectively suggest that we may very well be witnessing a remarkable revolution that may well knock the remaining wind out of record companies.
Other less well-known bands have already gone this route and begun selling directly to their fans -- Royal Crown Revue and Collective Soul are two that immediately come to mind, not to mention the legions of bands who give their music away on their websites and on MySpace -- but the fact that two huge players like Radiohead and NIN are no longer willing to play the record companies' game is a huge defection. I don't completely agree with Ed's assessment, but I sincerely hope that the company executives get their heads out of their asses and stop treating their customers as criminals. They're losing millions of dollars on their petty little RIAA crusades, and it's produced nothing but ill will toward them. It's time for a sea change, and we may be seeing its emergence.