Another reason to love Nine Inch Nails

NIN Year Zero: Too Much for the RIAA – Gizmodo

Oh my gosh, he’s realeasing free MP3s!  Now all the artists will starve!

Oh, wait, what?  The free tracks are creating tons of buzz for the upcoming album?  That can’t be!  That flies in the face of everything the recording industry has told us.

Could it be that the RIAA is wrong?

New Nine Inch Nails single

You can hear it on the NIN MySpace page.  I’m really not sure whether I think a Nine Inch Nails MySpace page is one of the great things about the internet, or one of the signs that it’s all ready to come crashing down.

Nine Inch Nails is one of the few bands whose cd I will buy without hearing anything from it.  It’s a pretty short list, especially after Garbage’s most recent cd refused to let me rip MP3’s and they fell off the list.  Actually, the list may just be Nine Inch Nails at this point.  Cake’s most recent cd was pretty mediocre.

Anyway, hearing that the new cd is coming out in April is the first time I’ve been excited about music in a while.  I haven’t listened to music on the radio in a long time.  When HFS went away, leaving us with only DC101, I mostly switched to NPR.  I’m tired of the RIAA, of copy-protection, of DRM.  And I’m tired of the same old crap music being played over and over.

But I should have a new cd on April 17th.    I’m looking forward to it.

Complaining through song

Treehugger: The Complaints Choirs of The World

Global Warming got you down? Wish your city had better recycling programs or more bike lanes? These are some of the issues that the Complaints Choir of Helsinki and the Complaints Choir of Birmingham are singing about.

If I could sing, I would totally want to do this.  These two groups sing about their complaints.  I’m sure my compatriot over at VentBox will be interested to see this, as well.

Score one point for those of us who call it complaining rather than venting.

Lets not get ahead of ourselves

Boing Boing: Will Bix kill the record industry? (I hope so)

This is a cool idea.  This new company, Bix, started by the guy who build epinions, is going to pretty much move American Idol online, except without obnoxious hosts.  The idea is to hold online contests, where maybe everyone pays an entry fee and the winner gets a chunk, or things like that.

Let’s see . . . combine YouTube with American Idol, tempt people with the idea of getting “discovered”, and sell advertising everywhere?  That sounds like a business model that could work for a while.

Plus, if it gets big enough, maybe some cool bands will get discovered that don’t sound like they were manufactured for MTV.  I think the musings at BoingBoing that suggest this could kill the recording industry are a little far-fetched, but giving up-and-coming musicians and whatnot a lower barrier to entry into the market sounds good to me.