I like NIN, but man that last album (Year Zero) annoyed me. Well, mainly the marketing annoyed me. There was an alternate reality game with douches insisting to me that this ARG is different somehow and that it was being made into a movie and it was going to last for the next 3 years. And it was all bullshit of course, the game wrapped up when the album came out as anyone with half a brain knew it would. That whole viral marketing thing just bugs me. It was cool the first time I saw it, every subsequent time it’s been embarrassing. And I wasn’t a huge fan of the music on Year Zero either. A couple good songs, lots of static noise nonsense.
Anyway, all this is a precursor to say:
NIN just released a new album (I linked to the wikipedia page because NIN’s site is being hammered right now). No prerelease marketing, no games, no bullshit. And they’re giving (part of) it away free. There’s four parts of this 2-hour instrumental album, and you can download the first part in 320-kbps MP3 format. Or you can pay 5 dollars and download the entire album in that format or one of two lossless audio formats. You’ve gotta give Radiohead credit for starting this thing but they kinda screwed up on the file formats (they only offered 160-kbps MP3s) and only making the first disc available to download even for paying customers.
So I don’t really have any specific point here but hey, kudos to Trent Reznor. I paid the five bucks without even listening to the free stuff, because I want every band to use this model.
Update:
I listened to the majority of the album, and it’s not bad. But it is what it is, a 2 hour instrumental album. I’m not going to listen to it over and over, and I’m not gonna go back and listen to my favorite songs because I have no idea when each song started or ended and I wouldn’t be able to remember its name anyway because the tracks have no names. Reznor will hopefully use this release model with his next real album but using it for this one is slightly less remarkable because there would probably not be a lot of record companies jumping at the chance to release it the old way.
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A friend was telling me about how they read an interview with Reznor where he talked about paying something like $5,000 for the download or something. Wacky ass.
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[...] out, much to everyone’s surprise, in a very high quality, successful, impressive example of digital distribution done right a few days ago. I heard it was all electronic and instrumental, which sounded pretty good to me for [...]