Trent’s experiment a success.

Trent’s experiment was apparently a success, all copies of the limited $300 boxed set were sold out as I thought it would be despite much of the material being available for free (or, as they expected to happen, all of it). As it points out, that’s $750,000.00, basically overnight, not including any of the less expensive options (being broke, I went for the $5 option in Flac).

I can only hope that as time passes more bands realize that the RIAA’s legal tactics and DRM are a waste of everybody’s time as Radiohead and NIN and such have. Audio cassette tape recorders didn’t starve the artists. VCRs didn’t starve the artists. CD burners didn’t starve the artists. DVD burners didn’t starve the artists. The internet isn’t going to, either. Despite what they want you to think, they’re lying. It is, however, going to make brick and mortar music stores obsolete, much as it is doing to public libraries. I mean, why the fuck would you buy a CD which has been purpously ruined by the producers(or for the lazy, this video) when you can get a better copy that actually sounds like the artists wanted it to, for less money, with all the the money actually going to the artists that created it?

Coverage at Techdirt.

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV

So Nine Inch Nails has released a new album. So what? I don’t usually keep track of, let alone care, of such things, but this one caught my attention. They’re releasing it from their site, with options from a $5 download (for all 36 songs) in a variety of DRM-free formats (including Flac) to a $300 limited edition boxed set, including vinyl, signed by Trent Reznor (which considering the traffic load is likely sold out by now). And yet more interestingly, one of the options is all of Ghost I, DRM-free, in mp3, for free. Not only that, but there’s even an official torrent for it at The Pirate Bay. You can guess what I’m going to be Scrobbling for a while now.

About the albums, from the site:

Nine Inch Nails presents Ghosts I – IV, a brand new 36 track instrumental collection available right now. Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I – IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Trent Reznor explains, “I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective – dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.”

See also the discussion at Slashdot.