Trent Reznor “disheartened” by current state of music industry
I saw on NME this morning that the Nine Inch Nails mastermind isn’t too happy right now with the state of the music industry.
Reznor posted his feelings on Nine Inch Nails website after discovering the sales figures for rapper Saul Williams new album, which Reznor produced.
Following a similar method that Radiohead used for In Rainbows, Williams’ latest album was offered online and gave fans two choices. The first choice was to download the album for free or the second choice of paying $5 for a better quality version.
Reznor stated that “As of 1/2/08, 154,449 people chose to download Saul’s new record. 28,322 of those people chose to pay $5 for it, meaning: 18.3% chose to pay.”Reznor also compared these sales to Williams’ 2004 self-titled album, which sold 33,897 copies and found it “disheartening” that so few fans paid the $5 for the album.
However, Reznor is trying to stay optimistic by adding “Saul’s music is in more peoples’ iPods than ever before and people are interested in him. He’ll be touring throughout the year and we will continue to get the word out however we can.”
Honestly, I’m kind of confused by Reznor. This is the same guy who told fans in Australia to illegally download Nine Inch Nails albums instead of paying the asking price in Australia, which was extremely high and obviously set by the label. So, it seems that Reznor doesn’t mind cheating the label, just don’t do it to him.
With that being said, I’ve always respected his feelings on getting his music out to the fans. I admire the fact that he doesn’t want fans to get ripped off and his been extremely generous with his work by letting fans remix tracks even.
Because of this, a big part of me doesn’t want to bash the guy. I’m pretty certain that he’s not in it for the money, but I think he was a bit naive. Common sense would tell most of us that if you give people the choice of something for free or paying for it, that they’re going to take the freebie; even Radiohead felt this effect, but it didn’t hurt them as much because they have a huge fanbase and got a lot of hype for In Rainbows.
I think Reznor has learned a valuable lesson and I hope he doesn’t stay disheartened for long, because next the NIN album will probably be going the same route, minus the free download option.
Comments Off