I don't get your point though. Why wouldn't he do the same format with any new release? Edit: Did a quick search. $1.6 million in one week. http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/03/nine-inch-nai-2/ http://www.today.com/id/23506799/ns.../nin-makes-ghost-record-machine/#.Uah2b0Csh8E http://www.rollingstone.com/music/n...-trent-reznor-an-instant-millionaire-20080313
Dude's getting older and probably just doesn't want to worry about all that ancillary shit anymore. "Let someone else sweat over this while I make music and play shows," or something to that effect.
Which is, imo, totally understandable. As long as he doesn't let himself being "choked" by the label, which won't be the case, then that's completely fine. Like you said, "let someone else sweat over the marketing side of things while I make music and play shows". I'm sure he's still involved in that, though.
You don't understand that if he just released an album himself (IE without a record label), like he did with The Slip and Ghosts, and didn't include all the multi-tiered priced packages (like Ghosts), how he wouldn't make 1.2 million or whatever in the first week? So you think if Trent released The Slip for $10 instead of for free, he would have made close to what he did with Ghosts? That's my point. Ghosts only made that much because there were $5, $10, $75 and $300 packages.
I'm asking you why would he not release each future album with those packages? Ghosts was a release of random music that had no hype behind it, yet he had multiple options you could choose to buy and he made a bunch of money off of it. Why would he not have those same options with every future release? Does he not like making money? It worked too well having so many different packages, so he'll just shrink it back down to 1 or 2 options for future albums? $1.6 million is probably more than most artists have ever put in their pocket from one album's sales. And that was just in a week. He was obviously onto something revolutionary, and he knew it because he released the data, so I don't understand his decision to move away from that idea.
Because he had to finance it himself, probably? And he only broke even, more than likely. Too time consuming, when his focus could be on the music. That whole time period was just Trent giving back to the fans. The Slip (free) came before Ghosts, then sometime later he dropped that 400GBs of raw concert footage for the fans to do with what they please after he couldn't get a DVD financed and made. I'm the first person to say record labels are dying (albeit slowly), but their seemingly unlimited financial funds can't hurt his decision to move NIN and HTDA to a major label. If anything, I'd say this increases the chances of all of that you mentioned happening again. The different priced packages and whatnot. He might be a millionaire, but I'm sure the Ghosts stuff wasn't cheap. It had to have been tedious as fuck, too, if you remember that YouTube video he posted of himself hand signing 2500 copies of that super limited edition.
Yeah, it had to be stressful making sure everything was ready and exactly like how you wanted it to be. Making sure all the CDs and Vinyls are ready, etc. I think I remember hearing that his site crashed because he wasn't expecting anywhere near the traffic he was getting. People were flocking to download. So that had to be a pain to fix that and buy more bandwidth and apologize to fans. I bet he profited at least half of what he was taking back, though. The Slip was a nice gesture. Also, I think he said it just wasn't something he felt good enough or proud enough about to charge people money for it. The big bucks come from touring. That's also really draining, so I hope the label isn't getting too much money from that.
Oath we are! I'm super excited for this, hoping some of the amtospheric soundtrack esque stuff influences this - The Slip was good but songs like 1,000,000 and Head Down are just too straight forward for me to be impressed by them, considering the standards I expect of NIN
Head Down was my favourite song too, it was the only one which had some Fragile-era atmosphere for me. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed The Slip. But yeah.
Ditto. I think bringing up Ghosts as an argument is a moot point though. He had to finance that entire project himself. Yeah he sold the supermegafan package but I don't think people understand how expensive that package was to produce. He was basically banking on downloads to cover the money lost for every $300 package sold. Having released albums I can tell you every piece of package is expensive which is why people rely on major labels for distribution. Every article says "Oh he made $750,000 alone with those!!" Yeah there is NO WAY that is the gross profit. They are not taking in the cost of producing that whole package.
Plus he has to pay his employees at the Null Corporation and whatnot. I've said it before, but The Slip is what With Teeth should have been.
Half of The Slip was pretty meh. The same drum machine was overused and the songs didn't have much else to them. Head Down, Lights in the Sky, The Four of Us Are Dying, and Demon Seed are the only songs I really think are great. With Teeth is pretty solid I think for the most part.
New song is called Came Back Haunted. http://news.radio.com/2013/06/04/nine-inch-nails-to-debut-new-single-came-back-haunted-june-6/
I hope it sounds like this little gem: [video=youtube;mqKzeI5XFLo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqKzeI5XFLo[/video]
These pics popped up in my Facebook feed today. So lol. From The Fragile. Makes me wonder what his first tracks on the computer looked like.
Wow I didn't expected a new song to come that early. Can't wait ! Also, the "harkens back to early NIN" could be a really interesting thing. Trent hasn't used this sound in a while and I'm curious to hear how he handles it now. Though maybe the new songs has nothing to do with early NIN and the description is simply misleading