Downloadable Contempt

Posts Tagged ‘nine inch nails’

Time to reboot the band.

Trent Reznor understands the modern music audience more than most musicians today. He’s given away songs and albums for free online, created an entire community for people to remix his music, and has fought against the music industry more times than I’ve fought against the urge to run over Lars Ulrich’s smug little greedy douche-goblin head with an adult-sized big wheel.

Trent’s latest addition to this legacy, was to record several of the live shows on Nine Inch Nails’ “Lights In The Sky” tour in HD Video, and upload all of that raw footage to the series of tubes, and allow fans the chance to make the ultimate concert video. From www.nin.com:

Fans have edited thousands of videos from the footage, assembled their own DVDs and live albums, even held theatrical screenings of their creations. And now, the ambitious and well-organized group known as This One Is On Us have released their massive, highly-anticipated creation, Another Version of the Truth: The Gift.

The video is available in a number of formats and sizes. I’m stunned at the amount of work that people have put into this project. I still have videos of my dog from 6 months ago that I haven’t downloaded from my camera.

Now, some people would argue that it’s easy enough for Trent to give so much shit away, because he’s already made enough money via the traditional music system. That may be, but he could have just as easily tried to fight against piracy and the inevitability of the future of music that the internet has created, and sued people and been a self-important greedy prick, ignorrant of the fact that, if it wasn’t for bootlegs and piracy, his music may not have built the core that helped him become the success he is today.

But that’s a discussion for another post. And that post will be called, “Fuck You, Metallica.”