NIN Flips Off the Music Industry

In a passive-aggressive display of disintermediation, Trent Reznor of NIN released Ghosts I – IV, 36 brand new instrumentals directly to the web. You can find it here:

http://ghosts.nin.com/main/home

In this case, NIN has bypassed the traditional distributors and music industry process to get closer to his listeners. As he describes it on his website, he wanted to have a purely creative process drive the project.

Pretty cool – now imagining the music industry starting to feel a bit redundant. If an artist can creatively control all of their content, release directly to the web and mass-market their own material, if they can control all of the rights and payment and royalty mechanism… kinda makes you wonder what a label is for. What extra value will the label bring to artists of the future, changing the whole power dynamic: the artist chooses the label instead of the other way around.

Welcome. The new age of music is upon us.
R

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