2008 Woodie Awards
Putting the ghosts to rest
Michael DiGrande
Issue date: 3/11/08 Section: Arts and Entertainment
The music industry is dying.
Climbing CD prices coupled with digital sales from iTunes and Amazon that don't quite cover the loss, make for a business that's in need of serious restructuring.
Yet despite this, record labels resist change and pass off the costs to the consumer. Normally, businesses would change their practices to better fit the needs of the market, to turn profit, but here we see the business strangling what little life is left from those that still pay for music.
This is where Trent Reznor has decided to plunge a giant, nine inch nail, into the coffin of the music industry.
And rather than use 2008 as a time to rest on his laurels after the smash "Year Zero" and "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D," the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has decided to use his new found freedom from Interscope Records to make a huge statement.
In the waning hours of Mar. 2, www.nin.com was completely reconfigured to allow for the distribution of Nine Inch Nail's newest album, "Ghosts I-IV."
There was no official statement, no press releases, just a cryptic blog entry two weeks prior in which Reznor simply stated, "2 weeks."
While NIN's management team has been responsible for running the website and maintaining the servers, there is no distribution or marketing being done from any sort of record label.
In fact, the only thing Reznor has stated about the project, besides names of various producers and NIN personnel, is that it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike Act.
Being protected under this act allows Reznor to not only maintain full control of his work, but it forces people to attribute him if they use the material from his work for remixes. It also allows people to freely share the material found on "Ghosts I-IV" without the threat of legal action, so long as they don't use it for commercial gain.
In other words, file sharers can freely download without the fear of a lawsuit.
Climbing CD prices coupled with digital sales from iTunes and Amazon that don't quite cover the loss, make for a business that's in need of serious restructuring.
Yet despite this, record labels resist change and pass off the costs to the consumer. Normally, businesses would change their practices to better fit the needs of the market, to turn profit, but here we see the business strangling what little life is left from those that still pay for music.
This is where Trent Reznor has decided to plunge a giant, nine inch nail, into the coffin of the music industry.
And rather than use 2008 as a time to rest on his laurels after the smash "Year Zero" and "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D," the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has decided to use his new found freedom from Interscope Records to make a huge statement.
In the waning hours of Mar. 2, www.nin.com was completely reconfigured to allow for the distribution of Nine Inch Nail's newest album, "Ghosts I-IV."
There was no official statement, no press releases, just a cryptic blog entry two weeks prior in which Reznor simply stated, "2 weeks."
While NIN's management team has been responsible for running the website and maintaining the servers, there is no distribution or marketing being done from any sort of record label.
In fact, the only thing Reznor has stated about the project, besides names of various producers and NIN personnel, is that it's licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike Act.
Being protected under this act allows Reznor to not only maintain full control of his work, but it forces people to attribute him if they use the material from his work for remixes. It also allows people to freely share the material found on "Ghosts I-IV" without the threat of legal action, so long as they don't use it for commercial gain.
In other words, file sharers can freely download without the fear of a lawsuit.
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