Nine Inch Nails are back with another free release; this time, it’s an upcoming album release called "The Slip". And NIN continue to give us the kinds of formats we like, with the income this time coming entirely from physical sales:

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

The Slip Minisite (NIN)

Okay, 24/96 WAV files seem sort of like overkill, but it’s nice to have these other options.

Updated: It also seems that NIN has used a Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial / share alike license, so you can remix their track for non-commercial purposes, free. (That’s quite a lot more generous, I’m afraid, than Radiohead in their remix contest — the objection from many observers wasn’t just that Radiohead was charging for the stems of “Nude” separately, but that they retained copyright ownership to remix artists’ work.)

One thing no one seemed to mention about the previous NIN release Ghosts was that the content of the music had taken a different and presumably non-commercial direction, meaning the new distribution method was basically a necessity. I enjoyed that direction, and a lot of you evidently did, too.

But judging by the way this is spreading through the Web, I think we’ve learned that there’s a three-step method to making music distribution a success: 1. give people something free, then hope for sales of something else, 2. give them access to the formats they want, 3. be Nine Inch Nails. Now if only #3 were a bit easier.

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro is manning the touchpad on his laptop given all this hardware around, but the cascading patterns on the Monome suggest both LED art and a digital take on a player piano.

More videos on the official NIN YouTube page, which has recently launched a visuals contest for interpreting music from the new album.

But lest you think you need all that pricey hardware to make use of an unusual tool, look no further than MilkyTracker. Platform wars end here: MT runs on Windows (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and Vista), Mac OS X (PowerPC, Intel), Linux (x86, 64-bit x86, PowerPC), Linux game/mobile platforms (GP2X, ARM), UNIX (FreeBSD x86), and Windows CE. Wowsa. And it’s all yours for a donation, if you can spare one. Heck, there are even video tutorials on the site.

But geekdom aside, I love that MilkyTracker ninjas can make so much music out of so little. Without taking on the aesthetic style here, if that’s not your thing, it’s a reminder that economical choices with your tech can produce all kinds of different sounds. So, maybe rather than loading that preset, try to construct a drum kit out of basic waveforms.

Enjoy!

Video by extrabajs; for some reflections on MilkyTracking, see our friend thumbuki — who, speaking of doing more with less, is working with an OLPC. Economical hardware use is back in an age of power efficiency and computing beyond the deep-pocketed “first world” — and everything old is new again:

Milky Tracker @ thumbuki

What? MilkyTracker is fanning the flames of a platform war with the Atari ST? No worries: MaxYmizer is a newly updated (yep, you read that right) tracker tool for the Atari platform. Polyphonic MIDI input and MIDI clock output means it should easily integrate with your existing studio. See the Digital Tools blog for full details.

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.

It was inevitable. With the likes of Radiohead doing “donationware”, DRM-free MP3 downloads, someone was bound to follow. (And, in fairness, Radiohead were by no means the first — this is something various artists have been talking about or doing for years. Updated: for some examples of other free albums through music history, see comments below. And as the trend grows, expect a lot more artist-to-listener downloads, or even small label-to-listener or small online store-to-listener, soon.)

The latest is Saul Williams, with the album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!” So, what has he got that Radiohead hasn’t got?