All posts tagged "Trent Reznor"

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/v/cBWhh5Jq9p4&hl=en&fs=1& expand=1]"Sound Opinons" had another great podcast this week, an interview with Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails about the second coming of his career, now that he's label-free and doing his own distribution, an experiment that's been wildly successful. What Reznor's been doing is releasing his music online, mostly for free or for consumer-determined prices. He's made quite a bit of money off it, especially with incorporating strategies like Radiohead did of selling special edition hard copy versions over the internet. Reznor fully admits that this strategy really only works for people who are not only already established, but have a fanatic fan base that will drive album sales and basically do all the promotional work for you. Still, it's a move in the right direction of really trying to cope with what the internet means for the music industry. It's interesting in light of the news they report about the exponential growth sales of vinyl in the past couple of years. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of brand new LPs come with a coupon to download the album for free.* Another response is the deep discounting of downloadable albums---I bought Grizzly Bear's newest for $3 and today you can download The Gossip's new album for $8 at Amazon. People want to have something to hold in their hands if they pay full price (which is one psychological reason that I think vinyl sales are going up, and certainly why I like vinyl---a lot less disposable than CDs).

Although yes, it is fun to make fun of the constant renaming of the swine flu (Political correctness! Confusing name! Trent Reznor's new concept album!), but it's, uh, actually important, as people and governments react to what the disease is called.