If you haven’t yet read Trent Reznor’s open letter to rising artists, it’s worth a look. In advance of an ostensible farewell tour for Nine Inch Nails, the Prince of Pain imparted the young hopefuls treading his footsteps with some advice on what to do now that music is totally freaking free. And while we all know the music industry can barely be so called anymore, it’s heartening to hear it from somebody who is at—or near—the top, and believes in leaving the old business model for dead. It’s not an exhaustive guide, and the theories really aren’t all that radical. It’s just a suggestion to take a good, hard look at the writing on the wall, from a dude who’s been around the block. [UPDATE: Yeah, I'll mix metaphors all I want. Wanna fight about it? -- ed.]
Amongst Trent’s bullet points were a pair of websites I hadn’t heard of: Bandcamp and Soundcloud, each of which proposes a new and improved way of getting your music to the people, without the help of the mighty MySpace. Here are their intro videos—I warn you that the Bandcamp one sports some Apple-ad smarminess, and the voice-over on the Soundcloud one gets a little grating. But such trifles aside, both of these stand to be powerful tools for uncertain times.
BANDCAMP
SOUNDCLOUD
Tags: bandcamp, nine inch nails, soundcloud, trent reznor
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man, you weren’t kidding about those demo vids … hard to watch.
it’s funny — i think my initial negative reaction to this was extremely subjective and i value your even commentary very much. i still feel it was a valid reaction, though i very much appreciate that Mr. Reznor is coming out on the side of independent have-nots with actual useful information. I also appreciate that he is not making like he invented the idea of new media or free music proliferation, as others (ahem, Radiohead) seem to have done in the past. I think essentially I have a knee jerk response to all advice I perceive as being handed down the ladder from music professionals who have “made it” or industry professionals who see themselves as being on some kind of “inside track.” Maybe working in the music industry bubble for several years soured me so much on this backhanded type of advice that I now find it hard to recognize genuine wisdom about how to survive, even when it bites me in the butt.
It should also be said that NIN’s latest album was and is distributed free, with the added benefit that it’s truly inventive, a solid addition to the catalog, and still avowedly about as anti-mainstream as one can get while still being catchy- sparse arrangements, odd sound combinations, almost savant musicianship combined with scary production prowess. Thanks Trent.
http://theslip.nin.com/
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