NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
I can't remember which album it was, perhaps "With Teeth," or the mentioned "Ghosts I-IV," when Trent Reznor offered the GarageBand files for the album. I thought it was amazing for an artist to offer their work up for people to remix and view, as long as they weren't profiting off of it. I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
As an early teen when Broken came out, and I happened to be connected to some people into the 90's emerging industrial scene (not to take away from earlier scenes), NIN has always been a huge inspiration and got me into the grittier side of metal music.
> I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
You know, right this second I am listening to a MIDI recreation of the soundtrack to a very obscure German Atari ST puzzle game from '84. Something somebody recreated where I would be surprised if more than 500 people in the world ever heard the original.
Even though you might never learn of it, given the vast number of people out there, it is entirely likely that what you did already touched somebody out there. You do not need to have built a community in order to have done something of significance.
Sorry to get back to you so long after you posted, but I really appreciate your comment! Also a huge fan of Atari computers (I learned my first programming on my dad's Atari 130XE 8-bit around 1990, quite a while after it went out of popularity).
And you're not going to plug yourself I certainly will: Appreciate your work on the NIN Hotline all these years and everything else you've done/added to the community.
> Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay,
You'd certainly know better than I would but I feel like I recall Rob Sheridan confirming that in one of his interviews years later (not that there was really any doubt).
In 2006 there was a message posted by him in the forums that was: "This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn’t say that out loud). If you know what I’m talking about, cool."
At the same time a user on TPB named "seed0" uploaded:
- A previously unreleased, professionally produced, expanded DVD version of Closure
- The full Broken movie in DVD quality (which had never leaked - the low-quality leaked versions that had circulated for yeas were missing part of it)
- 3 "The Definitive NIN" collections - which included some things that were difficult to find otherwise. (And today there are official playlists/collections by the same "Definitive NIN" name on the streaming platforms).
Maybe more but those are the most notable things I recall until all the pro-shot concert footage from the Lights in the Sky Tour got released to the fans to play with a few years later - most prominently turned into the "Another Version of the Truth - The Gift".
Not that there was any doubt, and while I don't feel like digging through all the interviews/AMAs I am almost certain that Rob Sheridan (creative director at the time) confirmed years later that the "leaks" were directly from the NIN camp.
>People are only willing to pay for quality, mostly.
lol, lmao even.
In America at least, people pay for branding, and to give the impression that they're of a higher standing than they are - whether or not what they're buying is quality. Whether that's someone deeply in debt sporting Luis Vuitton, or a US President putting gold-painted foam ornamentation on the walls of the oval office.
When it comes to the arts, or boutique fashion, or small scale manufacturing, people also pay for parasocial reasons - a variation on the branding angle. Storytelling about the founder, or the people doing the work, pictures of the space where a thing is being made, will give potential buyers a sense that they're paying for authenticity. That's why there are so many garbage ads on social media of a twenty-something talking about the old "one weird trick" that changed their routine... just so they can dropship you some garbage from Aliexpress with a 300% markup.
>I am on the side of humanity here, but people don't pay for art.
Man, maybe you don't hang out with enough artists. It's true, people typically don't make the equivalent of a tech salary for art, but people absolutely pay for art, and artists are able to not only survive, but have the capacity to thrive.
I get what you're saying, and for ad agencies, game studios, etc. that's always been the case (I remember when office supply stores sold CD-ROMs full of Clip Art) All of the sound effects in Doom were from commercially available sample libraries. And this isn't even touching on "gallery scene and art auctions as money laundering facilities" side of things.
I get the impression that most of the people who post about this topic in tech circles are general consumers, already primed for slop by mass manufacture and pop culture. But even through that lens, "people don't pay for art" falls flat - looking at what people pay for Star Trek prop replicas, or buying into the now very diverse Disney ecosystem. Now, a lot of those kinds of folks might be more prone to slurping AI slop (Hey Gemini turn me into a Funko Pop!) but there are still tons of people who value artists and their artistry. I suspect you're just not among those people.
Hey fair criticism, I am not in the typical tech circle but I am not surrounded by artists making money either.
Maybe a better way to phrase my point would be "(companies) pay for output, not artistry" which is to say you can remove the artistry, and still sell it to (companies).
People making a living from music or commissioned art in their style and under there name are pretty lucky in my experience.
As someone in the process of building a niche museum about hyperlocal archaeology and history in my Philadelphia neighborhood, the timeliness of this post is excellent.
Speaking of, The Amsterdam Pipe Museum is fantastic. On the surface, it seems like some kind of stoner side show, but the people running it are very, very experienced archaeologists, and we ended up buying multiple books from them on the topic of pipes. Trained archaeologists in Philadelphia will look at a clay pipe and say "That's Dutch" but these guys are like "That's from Gouda, and was probably owned by a farmer"
>Flash was great. Is there anything Flash could produce that wouldn't render these days with SVG + CSS + JS?
This has more or less been the line from the day Steve Jobs decided Flash would never be available on the iPhone. And it was readily apparent that no one who said that worked in the audio domain. Things are much, much better now, but I remember challenging myself by trying to build a drum machine in HTML, Javascript, and CSS (not wanting to muck about in Canvas at the time) and while I could make it look decent enough, there was no such thing as a solid, reliable clock in Javascript, for about a decade. Just the way you played audio files back varied from browser to browser on the same machine. It was absolute garbage.
In-browser capabilities have basically caught up or exceeded what Flash did - I don't keep up anymore - but to echo other replies, the authoring tools just aren't as accessible. Maybe vibe coding tools close that gap. But the forced sunsetting of Flash set online interactive multimedia back at least a decade. It was never my main career path, but I more or less abandoned that fun side quest, and as evidenced by my feeling the need to comment here, it still kind of bums me out.
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums
And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
(p.s. wot up volk)
reply