Free Album from Nine inch nails, The future of music

Today Trent Reznor announced on the official Nine Inch Nails website that he would be giving his new album album "The Slip", free of charge under a creative commons license.

From their web site:
"We encourage you to remix it, share it with your friends, post it on your blog, play it on your podcast, give it to strangers, etc."

Now, this is not the first move like this, prince has been selling directly to the public for years. Last year we saw radiohead offering their album on the internet and you got to choose how much you wanted to pay. Now both these moves make sense, and are very significant.

Are we we seeing the end of the record labels as we know them?

I believe so. Take a look at the costs that go into producing an album, only a small fraction of that goes to the artist.

For years the recording industry have fought technology, refusing to embrace it yet technology and the internet allows you to bring down the distribution costs and lower prices.

With the internet most of these costs are zero, therefore artists can offer them at a fraction of the normal price or even free as NIN have. The future will be the democratization of music, previously artists had to make the right contacts and hope they would be noticed and get 'signed'. Now that wont matter anymore. The time from when music is actually recorded to when it will be released will be much quicker, and here is the best part:

We get to choose who are the best artists, and which artists get played on the radio and not the record labels.

P.S Lets hope the other band that was 'subtly' referenced in this post follows suit
P.P.S if you figured out the band, give yourself a pat on the back
P.P.P.S Posts to this blog will be a bit sporadic as i am working on another project

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