How to Destroy Angels - This is my excited face

So we have seen announced today the collaboration of a new musical project with Husband and Wife Trent Reznor and Mariqueen Maandig AKA "how To destroy angels".

To the right was my initial reaction to this news.  Now before I go any further you can follow them on twitter HERE (already 4000 followers when I signed up) and on youtube HERE (800 subscribers already).  Have a look at the website for typically Reznor teaser trailer goodness, the kind of thing we have come to expect from Mr Reznor over the years HERE.  He really does know what he is doing.

And that's it really.  He really does know what he is doing.  Now ignoring the music entirely (no really) as where as I am very excited about what the family Trent are going to produce that's not really the point of this blog.  What I am interested in here however is what they do with it.

If you have never heard of Trent Reznor's day job "Nine Inch Nails" firstly please let me know what rent is like under rocks as I'm a bit hard up at the moment and have to move house soon and secondly allow me to bring you up to speed.  Very quickly.  There are better places to learn of it than here, but in a couple of quick sentences.  Cleveland, Indsutrial Synth Pop, late 80's, unrelenting music that still managed massive critical acclaim, Grammys and success even though if you sit down and listen to it it really really shouldn't of.  Think angry man beating the shit out of scaffolding whilst playing keyboards but still somehow putting a massive smile on your face.  No I can't work out how he did it either.  Clever bastard.  To quote Steve Huey 

"Nine Inch Nails were the most popular Industrial group ever and were largely responsible for bringing the music to a mass audience."

If you're still none the wiser really just go an have a listen to Just like you Imagined from 1999's The Fragile on Spotify as you probably heard it already as it was on the trailer for 300  

Now what I actually want to talk about is the various ways in which NiN have distributed music over the years.

Nine Inch Nails albums have been leaked via the Internet pretty much since mp3's and netscape started having a party down your interweb pipe be that via mp3.com, napster, myspace or anything even vaguely similar.  NiN are the very definition of viral distribution and better bloggers than I have waxed lyrical on them in the past.  The 2005 album With Teeth was streamed in it's entirety via myspace and when physical copies were eventually released they were packed full of pro tools and ACID pro files allowing users to experiment with Reznor's music in a manner that suited them.  That's right, the physical copies came with something fans actually WANTED.  Enhanced CD's having photo and videos etc has been nothing new but it has never really carried much water with fans.  After all download song for free or buy track and get a photo as well, not really much incentive.  This was 5 years ago, somehow everyone else hasn't followed suit.  Ah well.

2007 saw Year Zero released. A concept album with the lyrics centred around fictional characters and an internet based alternative reality game called Art Is Resistance in which the stories and content contained within the music was continued across another medium.  So listeners could have the album on and play the ARG at the same time.  In a time in which Google tell us that people "graze" media, multitasking across many different delivery methods and subjects having multiple tasks centred around the same thing has got to be a win, surely?

The there are the Easter eggs, oh the easter eggs!  Running the static at the end of My Violent Heart through a spectogram reveals the image on right.  An arm and hand interacting with the sound file.  No really, there is ACTUAL imagery in this music.  And that's one example.

Perhaps most famously (or at least the one I have seen quoted and referenced most at conferences and the like) are the albums Ghosts I-IV and The Slip which was made available in a "pay what you want scheme" (much like Radiohead's In Rainbows)  plus more expensive variants of the album available to those that wanted them (The £300 Ultra-Deluxe limited to 2500 copies edition sold out in just 3 days) and was released on Creative Commons licenses as well as large amounts of concert footage being released via bit torrents.

So that was all a very very brief description on the kind of methods Reznor has used to release his music in the past few years.  It is not an exhaustive list by any stretch and even the most casual of googlings will reveal far more in-depth descriptions.

Now of course I am not completely naive (hehe naive is an anagram of Evian).  Could any of NiN's unorthodox methodologies yielded such success if Reznor had not already been incredibly successful through more traditional  recording industries models? No probably not.  Those Eight grammy nominations before the year 2000 didn't happen by accident, he is after all a very talented musician and the Universal Music Group know a thing or to about promoting their artists but in no way whatsoever does that invalidate what he has done.

Now I seem to remember Clarkson on Top Gear saying to pay attention to the new BMW M Series (or something, I'm not really a car person) as what are extras in that car will be standard features in 10 years, much the same can be said to be true of Reznor in my belief.  When How to Destroy Angels release material in the summer I will be amazed (and a little disappointed) if it is not released and promoted via methods that I previously had no idea about and I can't wait for that. 

In a few months Trent will once more take the current distribution model by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake and I for one can't wait to see what it looks like afterwards.

Oh and I bet the album will sound incredible as well.

rjk


**EDIT***
I am good to you, I really am

The death of the single and how it brought us to today

When I was 6 I saved up 4 tokens cut out from Wheetabix packets, sent them off, allowed 28 days for delivery and received "Come on Eileen" By Dexy's Midnight Runners as part of their Top Trax promotion.  This was the undoubtedly the beginning of something that would be massive in my life.  My room as a child growing up in South Wales was full of two things, He-man toys and tapes.  Everywhere you looked there was tapes, making that oh so very distinctive sound as you shifted another box to have them rattling around next to each other and then in one corner that was neater than the other, the 7" vinyls.

My pocket money went pretty much on two things from that point onwards, singles from Woolworths (I wasn't allowed in the record shop, it was full of bikers smoking roll ups and drinking strongbow) and then whatever change was left over went in the Street Fighter 2 machine in the corner.

Then in the mid 90's the weirdest thing happened.  I couldn't buy singles any more.  Slowly but surely the selection I had to choose between went away.  What had been rows of Vinyls and cassingles in my childhood, became the cd's (and microdisks, minidisks, dats......briefly) of just the top 20, soon after just the top 10.  Then albums, compilation albums and official film soundtracks.  Next to the pick and mix and the other stuff they try and sell you whilst you queue to pay.

The reasoning was simple.  Singles cost too much money to make and didn't generate enough profit per unit sold.  So out was the £4 single with the song you wanted, a remix and two b-sides and in came the age of the 2 good tracks, 10 fillers £15 album.  How many people bought OMC's album purely because "How Bizarre" was on there?  and more importantly can they name any other track from there?

"The Industry was looking for excuses to get out of it.  You had these arguments that singles were cannibalizing album sales.  So they killed the single"  - Jim Caparro (former president of Island Def Jam)

So they did, problem solved.

Terry McManus wrote the following in billboard magazine in 1997

"When [the record industry] stopped making vinyl singles and offered nothing to replace them, the industry stopped a whole generation from picking up the record-buying habit"

But surely that doesn't matter? There is no need for people to sample the product, to test it and see if they like it if they have to buy the whole thing surely?

McManus continues:

"...if you think about water that's trying to reach the surface it comes up in one place and you plug it up.  And you go, 'OK, that's plugged up, my water problem is finished.'  It's still seeking a way to rise to the surface."

A year later in 1998 Shawn and his Uncle John Fanning unleashed Napster on an unsuspecting world, something that McManus refers to as "the revenge of the single".

This morning we in the UK are preparing for a world which includes the Digital Economy Bill.  The British Phonographic society can breath a big sigh of relief that it has successfully criminalised it's customers and the £200 million it is currently "loosing to piracy" is bound to come flooding in any day now but in essence what have they done?

The trouble is, when you block and fight with your most creative citizens from doing something they love they will inevitably find a creative solution to that problem.  The revenge of Peer to Peer is coming, I wonder what it will be.

Home tapeing party anyone?