CNet has an interesting interview with Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor on his recent experiment with Saul Williams’ debut CD, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust.
Reznor and Williams made NiggyTardust available as a free download, but also let you purchase a higher-quality version for a nominal fee. In the interview, Reznor talks about his frustration with the level of interest in purchasing the CD:
Saul and I went at this thing with the right intentions. We wanted to put out the music that we believe in. We want to do it as unencumbered and as un-revenue-ad-generated and un-corporate-affiliated as possible. We wanted it without a string attached, without the hassle, without the bait and switch, or the “Now you can buy the s**** version if you buy…” No, no, we said: “Here it is. At the same time, it’d be nice if we can cover the costs and perhaps make a living doing it.”
It kind of gets into the bigger picture that you’ve had to face as a musician over the last few years, which in my mind was a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s pretty far down the hatch with me now: the way things are, I think music should be looked at as free. It basically is. The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There’s a perception that you don’t pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace.
Reznor goes on to suggest taxing your Internet connection to pay for music:
In my mind, I think if there was an ISP tax of some sort, we can say to the consumer, “All music is now available and able to be downloaded and put in your car and put in your iPod and put up your a– if you want, and it’s $5 on your cable bill or ISP bill.”
Reznor’s on crack if he thinks that we want to let the music industry f*** us like an animal and tax our Intenet connections.
via Podcasting News
i wish there had been some sort of feedback on the NT download site. i would have said “gonna DL this, and if i like it i’ll come back and buy it”. but, since i didn’t like it i removed it from my machine. and obviously didn’t pay.
in general, when i come across something i like (for free), i go out of my way to pay for it. hopefully, the artists and producers actually see the payment, which you usually never know.
as far as trent’s idea of taxing me… well like i say, he woulda got my money if i liked it. i’m bombarded by shitty music all day, i sure don’t wanna pay a tax on that!
as a follow-up example, bourbonese qualk put their entire catalog online for free a while back. i was ecstatic, since their stuff was very hard to find anyway. i DL’d all of it, and got hold of them to see what i could do in return. they asked for a donation to Médecins Sans Frontières rather than any payment to them. a few minutes later, MSF had $50 from me.
i know how hard being a musician can be, and i try my best to compensate the artist in the manner they see fit. with teh nets, distribution and compensation can now be immediate and direct. lots of creative things are yet to happen in regards to that.
some of these early experiments (radiohead, saul & trent, prince, etc) may be view with varying degrees of success (or failure) but it is a step in the right direction. the only thing i see the industry dinosaurs as being able to provide anymore is promotion, and i even see that going back to a grassroots, word-of-mouth thing, which is the way it should be anyway.
It can’t be lost on Trent that Radiohead did pretty well with their recent experiment.
Maybe the NiggyTardust album was bad? (I don’t know since I didn’t hear it and wouldn’t have liked it anyway). Seems like he’s in the same mindset as the rest of the music industry – if our product is tanking it’s because you’re some kind of idiot, or a thief. Couldn’t be the product is lame, no way.
I downloaded to check it out and it just didn’t hit it with me.
To my way of thinking, though, getting over 100,000 downloads of the album is pretty amazing considering it’s somebody that nobody has ever heard of.