Welcome to my Fave Five, Trent Reznor
Let me start by saying that I love music. I love listening to it, watching it, and owning it. What I do not like to do is to buy it. Obviously I must be a music pirate right? Negative. I don’t steal music. I simply choose to deny myself the joy of buying music until the RIAA cuts their crusade against the customers. I know the RIAA is being stupid and antiquated; the general public does. Hell, even some politicians do. That has yet to thwart their massive campaign of strong arm legal tactics that result in extortion payments from people that can’t afford to defend themselves.
Metallica is who I give credit to for starting us down this slippery slope. Their whole campaign against Napster triggered much of what we are enduring today. Thanks Lars. On occasion other artists have drawn a line in the sand and given their thoughts on the whole situation and a few of them have been right with the camp fighting to get rid of the RIAA, which in turns puts more money in the pockets of the creative minds behind the music, the artists. The most recent case of an artist being very vocal on the topic comes in the form of an interview with Trent Reznor of NIN.
I’ve never been a real fan of NIN, but I have a new found respect for Trent and why he makes music. I’ll include a few nice snips from the interview and then you can head over and read it all for yourself. Before I do that, I just want to applaud Trent for his stance. I hope more musicians take this stance and start a landslide of people leaving the major labels.
It must be an odd time then to have a new album, Year Zero, out?
It’s a very odd time to be a musician on a major label, because there’s so much resentment towards the record industry that it’s hard to position yourself in a place with the fans where you don’t look like a greedy asshole. But at the same time, when our record came out I was disappointed at the number of people that actually bought it. If this had been 10 years ago
I would think “Well, not that many people are into it. OK, that kinda sucks. Yeah I could point fingers but the blame would be with me, maybe I’m not relevant”. But on this record, I know people have it and I know it’s on everybody’s iPods, but the climate is such that people don’t buy it because it’s easier to steal it.
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Given all that, do you have any idea how to approach the release of your next album?
I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months” bulls—.
He goes on to talk about the label taking credit for his genius work on a personally expensed alternate reality game and how they bilk his loyal fans out of $10 for packaging on the new album even though it costs Trent $.84 personally.
The full interview on News.com.au
23 May 2007 10:29 am Chris 0 comments