Trent sez: “Buy all these music formats from meeeeeeeeeee!” Photo: Jenna Foxton.

Artists are known to mouth off a bit about the Future of Music and Digital Distribution and whatnot, but Trent Reznor is putting his money — and not money — where his mouth is.

Nine Inch Nails Menu of Ordering Options for Ghosts I-IV

via Mashable: Practice What You Preach: Nine Inch Nails Gives Away New Album

And they certainly have their bases covered with their new album “Ghosts”:

• Get the first volume of the album free on torrent sites (or via the NIN site)
• Pay US$5 for a download of all 36 tracks (take that, Radiohead!)
• Get a 2 CD box set for US$10 (which also includes immediate full download of the tracks)
• US$75 gets you the 2 CDs, a data DVD with the digital tracks, and a Blu-Ray disc with 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow
• US$300 Adds four LPs on vinyl, two prints, and Trent’s John Hancock — limited-run 2500 pieces

I think they should have just kept going. You know, $800 gets you cassette tapes, Pro Tools session files, 8-tracks, surround sound. $50,000 adds an IMAX film (projector not included) and one of those little plastic mini records. $500,000 adds a DIY planetarium show, plus a special Buddha Box edition and a low-power FM radio transmitter so you can self-broadcast the album. $1 million and you get a Jaguar pre-loaded with a specially-signed sound system that plays the album, plus reel-to-reel multitracks. $500 million and Trent comes to your house, brings his studio rig and console, and re-records the album for you in your living room.

Before you assume the downloads are worthless, though, even the torrent file includes PDF “liner notes” and 320 kbps MP3 files. Buy the download and you have an option of either FLAC lossless or Apple Lossless audio — something I know readers here have complained about.

There’s only one problem. The fact that musical superstars are experimenting with various formats amounts to great research into what people may want. But if you’re not a Nine Inch Nails junkie, this is all awfully … well, complicated. For lesser-known artists, it seems like finding just one or two solutions that make most people happy is a better route, and it’s not clear what those are yet.

I’m personally most interested to see how the torrent thing works. Then again, with bandwidth costs plummeting, serving up your own audio — even lossless audio — becomes a viable option for artists and small labels. And so far, the torrent doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing the for-fee options, as NIN’s site says they’re experience high volume of traffic and orders. If enough people spring for the higher-cost options, the free versions may pay for themselves.

Music community Last.fm has made a big announcement today: you can now play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Web. Last.fm has managed to leap over restrictions on what qualifies as a “jukebox” by signing deals with labels, from indie to biggie. So far, the US, UK, and Germany are covered, but Last.fm promises other parts of the world soon. You don’t get unlimited plays for each track, but a future subscription service will unlock that ability along with other features. (Last.fm’s subscriptions are already a nice feature, so paying a bit extra for that I imagine will appeal to a lot of people.)

So, how do artists get paid? That’s the interesting bit:

• Artists (or whomever the writer / publisher is) continue to collect royalties via collection societies like ASCAP and BMI, as with other services.
• Artists and labels get an additional cut of Last.fm’s ad revenues.
• Last.fm does an excellent job of referring people to digital downloads, via band websites and services like Amazon and iTunes. Those services are increasingly DRM-free (Amazon has the largest DRM-free catalog currently). And you can even go buy a CD if you like.

Beginning to get the picture? The digital age has brought a shift in consumption, but it’s possible it can still bring big revenue opportunities for artists. Connections to live music and merchandise of course can also help, and unlike a service like iTunes, Last.fm’s collections are curated largely by the community of people listening to them — which is good news for artists trying to get discovered.

I’m looking for a catch, but I think the only real catch is seeing whether this will translate into real checks for anyone but the biggest artists. And for that, we’ll just have to see how these services evolve. But by opening the door to full-length plays on Last.fm, that service clears the path for other services to get similar deals, or to connect to Last.fm’s listener data and community for their own service. The business model continues to get better. And for listeners, it’s a dream.

Free the Music [Last.hq, the Last.fm blog]

Television itself (well, American TV — BBC is doing just fine) has ground to a halt over online revenues for writers. How are musicians doing? Not so well, say Radiohead. Ars Technica notes that Thom Yorke has been going around pointing out many labels screw artists out of digital download income in contracts. The solution isn’t rocket science: get a better contract, get a different label, or go it alone. Radiohead chose the “go it your own” approach, of course. But whatever benefits they got from, erm, being Radiohead, the one thing you have in common with them is that if you do the same, you can also get 100% or revenue instead of 0%. And you’d have to be pretty unpopular for that to be a bad deal.

So much of the discussion of digital distribution issues is in broad terms, though, that last point could be missed. You have a choice: get screwed, or not.

Some time in the last few days, browser-based music tool Yottamusic went kaput. For those of you who never saw it, the site was brilliant. Like the Rhapsody music service, Yottamusic featured all-you-can-listen music for a subscription fee, all playable in a cross-platform browser. (Yes, even Firefox for Linux worked just fine, thanks to a Firefox extension.) Unlike Rhapsody, Yottamusic had an interface that was actually attractive and usable, and synced plays to the music community Last.fm. Social features let you easily discover music via what other Yottamusic listeners liked — not a new idea, but powerful when integrated with a subscription music service. At least Yottamusic died a graceful death: playlists created on the site can be exported as XML and even uploaded to Rhapsody.com. A lot of websites may not go as gently into that good night, or, um, whatever.

Now, some of this makes some sense. Yottamusic itself was a creation of Rhapsody. In fact, the logical next step would be to ditch Rhapsody’s clunky, obnoxious interface with animated album covers and whatnot, and learn from Yottamusic’s cooler social features and sleeker interface. Let’s see, did th– nope. Why kill bad ideas and maintain the good ones when you can do the reverse?

It’s hard not to feel like subscription-based music in general is not long for this world.