It has been a little while since I made an entry here but things have been getting a little busy recently, which is great news for my self-employement.
I've been getting back into music making recently, starting with a remix of a Nine Inch Nails track, Survivalism. This has been released as a multitrack session in Garageband format which is pretty close to having the original dry recordings to work with. I use Logic to compose with so the Garageband session loaded perfectly. I haven't finished with it yet but I'm really pleased with it so far.
I still can't get over the fact that Trent Reznor is doing this. I know it's great publicly for the album but it seems to go against everything the record industry stands for at the moment. It certainly brings a whole new meaning to sharing music. They plan to release every track on the album like this!
They did this with two tracks from the last album, "With Teeth". These tracks were "The Hand That Feeds" and "Only". It looks like they're taking it up a level this time by releasing every track and providing an official place to upload the remixes.
Talking of marketing genius, NIN also have a little reality game going on at the moment. Set in the future, a number of websites have been found that depict a dystopian society. Some of the content is a little disturbing, especially as it doesn't seem too far fetched.
Clues and pre-release tracks were 'leaked' in various forms including USB drives found during recent NIN gigs.
Even the mass media have finally caught wind of this: Stars compose new ways to use music.
It's very interesting to hear Trent Reznor's view on DRM and the state of the record industry. From the article:
The USB drive was simply a mechanism of leaking the music and data we wanted out there. The medium of the CD is outdated and irrelevant. It's really painfully obvious what people want - DRM-free music they can do what they want with. If the greedy record industry would embrace that concept I truly think people would pay for music and consume more of it.