> However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
I got invited to see a NIN show recently, which was very kind of them.
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
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(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
>He hasn’t done anything new since Pretty Hate Machine.
As an electronic musician myself, I actually find myself agreeing with you - and I've been a fan of Trent since the beginning; lets say, envious of him from the very beginning, admittedly, also.
I think he has found a formula that brings industrial electronic synth-/picture- heavy art to the masses in a pretty clinical way.
I blame, as always in such cases, Trents' GAS. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)
The degree to which an electronic musician sanitizes their gear, and actually more to the point: how often they do it, heavily maintains my interest in them, as a fan and as a musician.
Electronic artists who treat every single album as a chance to wipe the slate and plug in new things, are favoured in my camp. I especially like it when things go backwards and forwards - i.e. albums don't just keep getting Better Than Before™.
I mostly wrote a story about a concert. It was an amazing concert. I also wrote a missive about banning Trent Reznor from IRC three decades ago.
At the show, the music was good (of course it was -- I like NIN and have for decades), but the musicality of its performance was also very good. They all played it both with expert precision, and a great deal of passion. The endurance was staggering. And the technicals -- the management of different spaces (3 stages!), the PA, the lights, effects, video projections -- they all combined to alter my perspective of what is possible in a temporary, physical performance space.
I love going to concerts, big and small. This was my 4th NIN show. I've never been to any concert like that before.
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Anyway, you've already elected to change channels. So let's change channels.
You think Pretty Hate Machine was the embodiment of everything that Trent Reznor ever learned, or performed?
How does Broken fit into that picture? (It's very different, to me.)
How does the period-correct Purest Feeling fit into it? (It's very similar, but the horns are a bit much.)
How do the various Ghosts albums fit in there?
How do the rest of them?
What fits together, and what falls apart?
Please elaborate. While I'm not a musician and I don't have the background to dissect it myself, I do appreciate the elaborations of technical makeups of music when those who can take it apart elect to do so.
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The dude, Trent Reznor, has been publishing recorded music since 1989. I find the claim that it's all the same to be pretty extraordinary. I think that satisfaction of that claim would require extraordinary proof. (And I welcome that proof.)
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.
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.
Dave Matthews Band similarly cultivates the fan recordings.
https://antsmarching.org/ forum has hundreds, maybe thousands of show recordings. Often multiple for each night. They make their own official Soundboard releases that fans still purchase, but their stewardship of fan audio capture is commendable.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).