Nine Inch Nails Releases Free Album
Nine Inch Nails released a new album, The Slip, with little fanfare, just a simple message from Trent Reznor:
(thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years - this one’s on me)
Reznor released the album in several different formats for free download or bittorrent and released all of it under a Creative Commons (attribution-noncommercial
share alike license) license, including MP3, lossless AAC, WAV, and FLAC.
From a technical standpoint, I think Reznor is really on to something with releasing The Slip in several different formats, it’s a win-win for him:
- Everything that people download distribute is sure to be high enough/acceptable quality like he wants it (it is not damaged by re-encoding or anything)
- The files that you download are probably as direct reproductions from masters as technically possible
- The experience is exactly the way that they want it to be, album art is consistent, the files are ID3 tagged correctly
- If you can’t do physical media distribution, where there is a CD case and packaging that you can handle, this is the next best thing
This is what electronic music distribution is supposed to be!
You can download The Slip for free from theslip.nin.com
I originally came across The Slip on Wired.
On a related note, Megan and I are going to try to get presale tickets for NIN’s tour later this summer and they’ve got a really cool way to distribute the tickets and prevent scalping: your name is printed on your ticket, which has to match your ID when you go to the show. Good idea?
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