Angels Destroyed

The new post-NIN project from Trent called How To Destroy Angels. They're offering a download of their six track EP here, and you can see some teaser clips at these one / two / three / four spots.

The New Face Of Music

Other bands might have been first, but Trent Reznor is about to blow them all way with NIN's coming iPhone app, which completely enshrines his place as the Highlander of musicians on the internet.

The apps looks like everything that Web 2.0 was promised to be for musicians, wrapped up in an incredibly slick package. The app seamlessly combines streaming music with custom playlists; a Twitter-like social network within Nine Inch Nail's own network (that's location-aware, so you can look up where messages came from in Google Earth on your desktop); fan-submitted images and media from every NIN concert ever (also location tagged); and of course, an iPhone-friendly version of the website within the app.

The reason he was able to build this, and you don't see something like it coming from the mainstream industry, he says, is that "anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact - no idea." The app will be free should go live in the next couple of days after it gets final approval from Apple. They're already working on Version 2.0 for iPhone 3.0, which will include Google Maps integration and Push notification.


UPDATE: Oh, just read the whole article...it's better that way:

Trent Reznor was backstage one afternoon last summer, fooling around with his iPhone to stave off boredom before a show, when he realized that fans standing in line outside were broadcasting photos from the scene using their iPhones.

So he took the obvious next step: Using Twinkle, the same Twitter app the fans were using, he started sending out photos from backstage. And so an idea was born.

We started thinking, 'Hey, this could be pretty cool,'" Reznor recalls. A few days from now, the results should be up on Apple's App Store for anyone to use.

The free Nine Inch Nails app, scheduled for release as soon as it gets final approval from Apple, is a mobile window on all things NIN: music, photos, videos, message boards, even — thanks to a GPS-enabled feature called Nearby — the fans themselves.

Nearby is "kind of like Twitter within the Nine Inch Nails network," says Rob Sheridan, Reznor's long-time collaborator. "You can post a message or a photo by location, and if you're at a show you can see conversations between other people who are right there."

Fans have had their curiosity stoked by hints about the iPhone app that have shown up on Reznor's Twitter feed.

"We're all waiting for it," says Brandon Dusseau, a Milwaukee-based web designer who's one of the founders of NinWiki, one of the group's leading unofficial fan sites. "I'm sure it will get tons of downloads, and I'm hoping it will be a really cool resource. But all I know is, it's coming out soon."

In an exclusive interview at Reznor's home, a coolly modern structure high above the Westside region of Los Angeles, Reznor and Sheridan previewed the new app and explained how it fits in with their plans for survival in a post-label world.

The iPhone app is the culmination, at least for now, of a process that began a year-and-a-half ago, when Nine Inch Nails succeeded in extracting itself from its contract with Universal Music Group's Interscope label.

"When we found out we'd been released it was like, 'Thank god!'" says Reznor, trim and beefy in black jeans and a black T-shirt. "But 20 minutes later it was, 'Uh-oh, now what are we going to do?' It was incredibly liberating, and it was terrifying."

Since then, Reznor has pioneered a new, fan-centered business model that radically breaks with the practices of the struggling music industry. His embrace of "freemium" pricing, torrent distribution, fan remixes and social media seem to be paying off financially even as they have helped him forge deeper connections with the Nine Inch Nails faithful.

It's something he never could have done before, even on an indie label. "Anyone who's an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact — no idea," he declares. "I'm surprised they know how to use e-mail. They have built a business around selling plastic discs, and nobody wants plastic discs any more."

Meanwhile, the entire system that for a lucky few turned those discs into hits — rock radio, MTV, music mags, CD megastores — has crumbled, and label execs have no idea where to turn. "They're in such a state of denial it's impossible for them to understand what's happening," Reznor says. "As an artist, you are now the marketer."

And the only marketing vehicle that makes sense is the net. Reznor and Sheridan had used it successfully before, in the alternate-reality game they created with 42 Entertainment to explain NIN's 2007 album, Year Zero. But what else should they do? The Radiohead experiment — offer downloads online and ask people to pay what they want — struck him as an invitation to be insulted.

So after selling music for nearly 20 years, Reznor decided to give it away. He would expand NIN's website into an all-inclusive resource fans could use to find not just tour dates but photos, video, music — "a one-stop shop for every bit of information you could ever want," he says. Everything in the shop — including The Slip, his most recent album — would be free.

"I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think music should be free," Reznor says. "But the climate is such that it's impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we've tried to do has been from the point of view of, 'What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?' Now let's work back from that. Let's find a way for that to make sense and monetize it."

Over the past year, NIN.com has quietly evolved into a series of interlocking services designed to deliver maximum benefit to the fans at minimal expense to the artist. To build it out, Reznor decided to use off-the-shelf resources — Blogger, Twitter, FeedBurner, Flickr, YouTube — rather than trying to duplicate what other people had already created. "They're going to do a better job than we are," he explains, "and they're going to have a lot more resources to put into it."

"We're using what people are already using every day anyway," adds Sheridan, a smaller figure with a three-day growth of beard and pale, wolf-blue eyes. "It's media on the fans' terms, how they want to use it, instead of trying to be like this" — he wraps his arms around his torso as if trying to hold himself in — "which is the old-media strategy."

Under the circumstances, it made little sense to try to manage what went up on the site. Why would they, when they had an army of people who'd relish the job? "We'll never outdo a community of obsessive fans," Reznor says. "People who have the same maniacal completion problem that Rob and I have playing videogames — let them funnel that shit into making our website cool."

To put the fans to work, NIN's tech team — a Glendale, California, outfit called Sudjam — used the APIs for Flickr and YouTube to enable users to connect their NIN accounts with their accounts on those sites. That meant users could tag items on Flickr and YouTube and have them pop up on NIN.com, where other users will find them neatly ordered and ready for viewing. Sudjam expects to do the same for Photobucket and Vimeo shortly.

Obviously someone has to supervise all this, but Reznor has crowdsourced that function as well. NIN.com is mostly governed by fan moderators — unpaid superfans who enjoy special privileges on the site. "It becomes a source of pride for them," says Sheridan, "to make sure everything is what it says it is."

Next up: Incorporating a wiki into the site. The most likely candidate is NinWiki, which was built on MediaWiki, the open source software written for Wikipedia. By putting a fan wiki together with NIN.com's media galleries, which at last count comprised some 30,000 photos and videos, the utility of the data the two sites possess could increase exponentially.

"Here's this tour date from three years ago," Sheridan hypothesizes. "Through MediaWiki, the fans have entered in a set list. Each song is clickable, so you can see every show that song was ever played at. And it's tied into our image and video database, so you can also see every video that song appears in."

By making available — for free, of course — the individual tracks that make up the master recordings of his songs, Reznor has even crowdsourced the remix function. He released multi-track versions of his songs as early as 2005, but Interscope wasn't happy with the idea of putting fan remixes online. Now that he's been sprung from the label, that's no longer an issue.

At last count, NIN.com had 11,000 fan remixes available for streaming or download. Thanks to an XML feed, you can even subscribe to them as a podcast. "I doubt I'll ever pay someone to do a remix again," Reznor says, "because there's some amazing stuff just coming out of bedrooms."

Free downloads can cost a lot of money to deliver, especially when the options include better-than-CD sound quality. So for the higher-quality offerings, Reznor turned to BitTorrent — "the domain of pirates," he acknowledges, "but it's also a great technology that is free." Pirates are no longer the enemy anyway: "Our battle is against download costs."

To cover the costs of recording and distributing the album, Reznor also offered The Slip as a limited-edition CD for $10. Even as he urged fans to download and share the album online, he sold 250,000 numbered copies of the CD. The album is also available on iTunes for $9.90. "So we managed to permeate the marketplace," Reznor says, "and we also managed to monetize the album."

The one part of NIN.com that Reznor had custom-built is the piece that sits at the center of it all: the database of fan info that has been harvested from the registration process that's required to take full advantage of the site. That database, created by Sudjam, is what makes the tie-ins with Flickr and YouTube work, but it's also given Reznor 2 million e-mail addresses — which adds up to a pretty powerful distribution network.

"If The Slip had X number of downloads, we know who those people are and we'll reach out to them with the next thing we have," he says. A concert coming up in Atlanta? It's a simple matter to send out e-mails to everyone within a hundred-mile radius of the city. "That seems to be the most valuable thing you can get — a way to reach people," Reznor says.

Peter Jenner, one-time manager of Pink Floyd and The Clash and retired head of the International Music Managers' Forum, agrees.

"There’s an enormous value in having a relationship with your fans," he says. "More value even than in selling your records. I think old Trent's a sharp cookie."

Taking that connection mobile was the logical next step. "We created an app," Reznor says, "that reformats the website to make almost everything on it available in an iPhone-able version and also adds location-based awareness. This now brings it into the real world, where you can find people if you choose to."

When the band toured Europe last year, Sheridan regularly updated the site by posting pictures he'd snapped onstage. It was great, Reznor says: "People felt included. People kind of felt like they were getting postcards from us."

The iPhone app takes that a big step further. NIN.com has a Google Earth plug-in that fans can use to see conversations and photos from across the planet, or at a specific location. A feature on the iPhone app's Nearby tab will enable them to post messages and photos from their iPhones to the website and have them pop up in Google Earth.

All this is a long way from the powerlessness Reznor felt when he was starting out in Cleveland in the 1980s.

"One of the biggest wake-up calls of my career was when I saw a record contract," he says. "I said, 'Wait — you sell it for $18.98 and I make 80 cents? And I have to pay you back the money you lent me to make it and then you own it? Who the fuck made that rule? Oh! The record labels made it because artists are dumb and they'll sign anything' — like I did."

Reznor is still experimenting, and it remains unclear how effective his methods will be for less-established bands. But by spurring him to try new ideas, ending his label affiliation has given him a tentative new business model as well as a new form of engagement with his fans.

If the labels had tried to connect with fans online instead of dragging them into court, he figures, the music industry wouldn't be collapsing today. But no matter; he's moved on.

"My quest in life now is to surround myself with smart, innovative people," he says, "instead of the gangster types who have exploited artists over the years."

It Would Even Be A Superior Album

Chris Cornell has outdone himself with becoming terrible (as if it was possible after Audioslave and his second solo album) with "Scream", produced by Timbaland. And it hasn't escaped notice of Trent "NIN" Reznor, who not only twated,

"You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus!”

but also mocks it with an April Fool's zinger. So get yourself NIN's newest album, STROBE LIGHT!

Album Tracks

1. intro skit
2. everybody's doing it (featuring chris martin, jay-z AND bono)
3. black t-shirt
4. pussygrinder (featuring sheryl crow)
5. coffin on the dancefloor
6. this rhythm is infected
7. slide to the dark side
8. even closer (featuring justin timberlake and maynard james keenan)
9. on the list (she's not)
10. clap trap crack slap
11. laid, paid and played (featuring fergie of the black eyed peas and al jourgensen)
12. feel like being dead again
13. still hurts (featuring alicia keys)
14. outro skit

All will be forgiven if Chris does a Soundgarden reunion. And it's not impossible.

(BTW this is what that looked and sounded like.)

Tourgasm

I have no idea when or if they're coming to town (how could they not play LA?), but this is going to be the event of the year.

Originally posted on NIN.com:

2.16.09: A note from Trent and a wave goodbye

Towards the beginning of my career in Nine Inch Nails, our biggest break came in the form of an invitation to perform a series of shows with Jane's Addiction. These performances essentially created and defined the term "alternative" rock in the US, created an ongoing festival franchise that is still thriving (Lollapalooza), set the stage for Nirvana to shift popular taste a few months later, and were really fucking FUN to play and attend - truly the best times I've had. The shows were epic. So epic, they propelled NIN to the "next level" (whatever that means), but caused Jane's to implode. The band broke up at the end of that tour.

Fast forward to the present. Corporate rock STILL sucks. A friend tells me they saw the original Jane's lineup play a tiny show in LA that was unbelievable. I break out my Jane's records and am amazed by how vital they sound. These guys were the real deal and in this current climate mostly dominated by poseurs and pussies it was refreshing to hear something that sounded dangerous, volatile, beautiful and SINCERE. Emails were sent, phone calls were made, dinner was arranged, ideas were discussed and the next thing I know we're in the studio experimenting. We laugh, we get to know each other, we cry, we yell, we almost quit, we record LOTS of guitar solos, we discuss, we actually begin to all communicate, we yell some more, we become FRIENDS, we laugh again and we do some great things. I get to see first hand why they broke up all those years ago but I also get the chance to see four distinct personalities that become an INCREDIBLE band when they're in the same room.

In NIN world, 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of our first releases. I've been thinking for some time now it's time to make NIN disappear for a while. Last year's "Lights in the Sky" tour was something I'm quite proud of and seems like the culmination of what I could pull off in terms of an elaborate production. It was also quite difficult to pull off technically and physically night after night and left us all a bit dazed. After some thought, we decided to book a last run of shows across the globe this year. The approach to these shows is quite different from last year - much more raw, spontaneous and less scripted. Fun for us and a different way for you to see us and wave goodbye. I reached out to Jane's to see if they'd want to join us across the US and we all felt it could be a great thing. Will it work? Will it resonate in the marketplace? Who knows. Are there big record label marketing dollars to convince you to attend? Nope.Does it feel right to us and does it seem like it will be fun for us and you? Yes it does.Look for tour dates soon and I hope to see you out there.

Trent

A dual tour and the swan song of NIN, plus the very possible Reznor-produced Jane's album? Bittersweet all this is...

The Slip

Nine Inch Nails continues the free music bonanza with a new album, The Slip.

The buzy Mr. Reznor has done more in the last few years than any other period leading his band, but that's not to say that it's been a mass of quality with his quantity. Year Zero was hardly in the same league as With Teeth, it's predecessor -- and the the remix album didn't improve much. Having essentially scored Saul Williams' Rise And Fall Of Niggy Tardust as a more urban, beat-poetry Nine Inch Nails, he came up with the ambient-instrumental Ghosts I-IV, which was their first online release.

The Slip has it's great moments, but also suffers from a lack of objectivity and rushed writing. These past years have seen the NIN output skyrocket, but perhaps at the cost of their greater legacy. The electro-punk rock direction away from the industrial, moody feel of The Downward Spiral and The Fragile makes the band sound at worst like a group that has found a lot of fancy gear, and at best Nine Inch Nails covering someone else. Much like the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie, if they had paired down to half as much music, the collection would be amazing.

Through the glory of playlists and burned CDs, a terrific, hybrid Nine Inch Nails 2005-2008 could exist, but that's not the point here. There's a fair amount of throwaway tunes in the recent catalogue, but The Slip has far more promising music and less doodle-y filler. At a lean 43 minutes and with a quarter of that instrumental, the album finishes stronger than it starts. "Head Down" the halfway point of the 10 songs is a more recognizable NIN, if not a better thought out one. The piano and vocal combo of "Lights In The Sky" is a erie dirge, leading into "Corona Radiata", close to eight minutes of soundscape similar to the Further Down The Spiral sound. "The Four Of Us Are Dying" continues the theme, with a more upbeat electronic vibe.

Get your copy of The Slip in the format of your choosing.