Music – Nine Inch Nails “The Slip”
NiN has released their new album, “The Slip” for free download at their website. It’s available as high bitrate .MP3’s, wavs, and even lossless FLAC files. They even made album art available. I love bands making their music available for free download, so I’m happy to promote any bands that do. It exposes their music to a wider audience, which can only be a good thing for a band in the long run. I don’t understand why Metallica didn’t get that.
I like the new album. It’s great that Trent is still doing his thing.
Metallica actually DID understand, in the past — they became popular due to heavy cassette-trading of their No Life ‘Til Leather demo. And they knew this. So it’s not like they are ignorant — they are actually fscking hypocrites!
That’s sad. I used to like Metallica a lot, too. Once they got big enough to trade off their name, they tried to prevent other bands from making a name for themselves the same way they did.
Big labels are dinosaurs, and if they don’t innovate, they deserve to die. It’s like when vcr’s were invented, and the film studios fought them tooth and nail instead of Hello – adapting to the new technology by selling their products on tape! They eventually got it, but history has a strange way of repeating itself. Twenty years later, the big music labels tried to preserve their existing (ie obsolete) business model by killing all music downloading (instead of adapting to the new technology by offering their products for sale online). They tried to make their customers criminals – great business strategy. It didn’t work, of course – you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
The irony, for me, is that free file sharing is a great way to grow your brand’s name…the Grateful Dead allowed taping and sharing of their shows decades before online file sharing came along, and the outcome was they got a huge following, which they can now profit from by selling cd’s, because they developed a market.
For bands just starting out, especially, it seems really shortsighted to me to charge for your music, instead of giving it away free (which will build popularity, which you can *later* charge for, once you’ve established your product as a commodity people have a demand for).
All of this has been expressed much better elsewhere before, but, still…it’s amazing to me people still don’t get it.
/rant over
Your use of the word dinosaurs indicates you need to hear the NoFx song “Dinosaurs Will Die” — about the record companies. “I’m just glad I’ll be there to watch them burn”.
They player piano also faced incredible backlash, and is responsible for the early settlement of many of our copyright laws and such — but I’m sure you know more about that than me.
And Hollywood? The reason it’s in california was because Edison enforced his own patents with cronies, and that was the only place they could go far enough to produce movies without giving Edison his deserved royalties. Hollywood is what it is today due to piracy!
Ween, too, allows tardes of all their shows. Hell, they encourage it. I can almost always get soundboard m3ps of any ween show i go to, and sometimes dvd video.
favorited this one, brother