David Emery Online

Today Nine Inch Nails have taken the next obvious step and released their next album ‘proper’ (as Ghosts I-IV wasn’t really a proper NIN album) for free:

http://theslip.nin.com/

Is this clever or is this defeatist?

The previous experiments (worth noting) all contained some element of commerce about them; Radiohead with the pay-what-you-want and NIN with the ‘get 1/4 free, but pay for the rest’ model with Ghosts (Raconteurs I think just miss this list as their release was a manipulation of the traditional retail model, not something completely different). With The Slip however, Nine Inch Nails have given no option for people to compensate them or reward them for producing this music.

Not even a PayPal donate button.

What kind of statement does that put out? ‘We don’t think this music is worth paying for’? ‘We don’t think music is worth paying for’? Or is it just a practical recognition that their audience would probably go and download it anyway, and they will hopefully generate enough promotional value from it to drive sales of the forthcoming traditional release?

Is the statement ‘We think this music is only worth promotional value to us’?

I think it will be quite interesting to see what kind of media impact this release gets – especially in comparison to previous NIN albums – as I get the feeling that the ‘band releases album on the internet in an unconventional way’ story (and the ‘band release album for free’ story, for that matter) is getting pretty tired. While I’m quite certain that giving away music for free is probably a net win, in terms of word of mouth popularity, I’m not that for a big band it can compete with the swathes of publicity you would normally get around a release.

I would have been quite happy to pay for this album, even if there was a free version available. Especially considering I know that money would go direct to the band, which you never feel sure of if you’re buying a CD in a shop. I’m sure I can’t have been the only one…

The headline seen across the web yesterday:

Coldplay single downloaded by 600,000 people

Obviously the concept of giving away music for free is hardly a new one – Radiohead blah blah blah… – but I think this is an interesting spin on it. The role of the traditional single is to basically act as a loss leader for the album, getting the band played on the radio and generating publicity.

Giving it away for free in this manner seems to achieve pretty similar goals, without having to mess around with all that tiresome selling.

600,000 is a pretty big figure, and if you managed to sell that many you’d be laughing (although not necessarily in profit) – it’s a pretty huge promotion for the forthcoming album (as good on online promotion as you’d ever hope for, really). It also comes at a point when the physical single is all but dying out; digital download sales are where it’s at and CD singles are becoming an ever rarer sight on the shelves – it’s pretty hard to sell something if it’s not in the shops.

The net result of this is that – other then maybe the top twenty – the singles chart is quickly sliding into irrelevance. You’ve really got to question why you would actually bother going to the effort of making a physical single, recording b-sides and promoting it when you can simply tell radio you’re releasing a digital single on xyz date; you don’t have to do a thing and you still get the valuable album promotion from radio plays.

The other interesting aspect of all of this is that they’re still going to sell the track as a more traditional single after they’ve stopped giving it away for free; it will be very interesting to see how well it does. When Radiohead released In Rainbows on iTunes I think a lot of people were surprised how well it sold, but the set of people that will download something for free off a (relatively) untrusted website is a very different set of people to the ones that normally buy off iTunes. It’s why all the talk about digital piracy harming sales is massively overstated – yes, you might have lost a small amount of sales but the people downloading things illegally weren’t going to pay for it in the first place.

Of course, it would have been a lot more interesting if the song was any good…

Have we got to a point where we’ve now pushed past our boundaries – in music specifically, but other art forms as well – leaving us with no ‘edge’ and nothing to push against?

We have progressed slowly but surely through the rise of popular music with more and more becoming acceptable. Rock and roll (a quaint term, now, isn’t it?) was once the causer of controversy – you shouldn’t listen to that – and now the very same musical style is about as staid and middle of the road as you can get.

Obviously this is just the march of an ever more liberal culture and society and specific examples will, when given 50 odd years to simmer, obviously loose their edge, but I think the real question is what edge do we have left? Racism – in its many forms – is the obvious example, but I think is hardly an edge worth pushing up against. It’s also an inverse of many of the other controversies – really the boundary that has been pushed against is people being racist (as opposed to pushing for being racist).

Offensive language is no longer an issue – yes, it’ll get bleeped/muted on the radio but it’s hardly controversial. Similarly, drug use is so well established it’s become a cliché; no one is going to care if you write a song about cocaine. And celibacy would probably probably be more shocking then sex.

I cannot think of any current musician that is actually genuinely controversial. It’s all been done.

What happens to music without its edge?

As well as the rise of the ‘News Feed’, we’ve also gained another feature from Facebook that is slowly seeping into popular culture:

Status.

David is writing about status updates

Of course, most of you have just thrown your hands up in the air and gone “what are you talking about – we’ve had status updates for years in instant message clients!” and I’d agree with you – we (the freaks and geeks) have had this particular form of ambient social interactivity for years. However, while IM has a pretty high penetration rate outside the geek crowd in my experience ‘normal’ people don’t update their status on IM much more then to say they are having lunch or in a meeting – in fact, a quick glance at my buddy list (which is pretty geek orientated anyway) only shows one custom status message.

Of course, post IM and pre Facebook we got Twitter – a whole online community built around the concept of ‘what are you doing?’. There is no doubt that Twitter brought the concept of status to a much larger audience, but its time has already come and gone, I think; the general population thinks it has no interest in telling people what they’re doing – the concept of publicly (and Twitter is very much orientated at “public”) broadcasting is something that – in the UK at least – most people have a problem with.

Of course, the truth is that most people love broadcasting their status to as many people as possible, but getting over that hurdle is quite difficult – whenever I’ve tried to get non-geeks using Twitter they almost unanimously can’t see what the point is.

This is where Facebook steps in.

By building up a platform with all sorts of uses, built on top of the connections you make with your friends, create a perfect platform for a status updating service. People are reticent to join something solely about status updating, but I’d wager that logging onto Facebook once everyday, browsing your news feed and then updating your status is pretty par for the course for most Facebook users. Everyone I’m friends with on Facebook has updated in the last week. It’s interesting, I think, the way people will participate and use something that, when explained to them in basic terms, they see little or no value in.