The Martlet

Music as we know it is changing. The days when the record company was the be-all and end-all are fading. With the proliferation of both legal and illegal downloading, the music industry as a whole is fighting to retain control — and looking for new ways to rake in the big bucks.

An increasing number of artists are ditching their labels completely as a response to the changing landscape. Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has been one of the highest-profile acts to release music sans-label.

Founded in 1988, NIN never fit a specific genre of music, instead they were loosely categorized by some as alternative, industrial or experimental rock. Since 1988, Trent Reznor, who remains the only official member of NIN, has pushed the boundaries of conventional music. Yet NIN has remained at the top of the alternative music charts, enjoying ubiquitous play on Victoria’s modern rock station The Zone, as well as near-permanent locations on the mainstream charts including the Billboard 200 and MTV’s video rotations.

NIN released several albums under labels (most recently, Interscope) between 1989 and 2007. But when NIN’s contract with Interscope expired, Reznor decided to remain unsigned. He’s since released two studio albums, Ghosts I-IV, and The Slip independently through nin.com. When Ghosts was silently released on March 2, 2008, word spread fast.

Not long after the release, the website stated: “To our surprise, the traffic was more than three times what we anticipated, and has only been getting heavier throughout the day.” It caused servers to crash and the website to go offline. Ghosts was also officially released on bittorent site thepiratebay.com, and on amazon.com. It grossed $1,619,420 USD in online sales in the first week.

On May 5, 2008 Reznor posted on nin.com: “Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years — this one’s on me.” With that, he released The Slip, NIN’s latest studio album, completely free in a variety of formats for download. As of June 26, over 1,400,000 individual people had downloaded The Slip.

NIN isn’t the first mainstream band to challenge conventional album releases. In 2007, Radiohead released In Rainbows, their seventh full-studio album for download at whatever price fans saw fit. Much like The Slip, the album received critical acclaim and sold over three million copies.

Do these unorthodox releases actually make money? According to a report by Radiohead’s publisher Warner Chappell, most people paid nothing for the download, however pre-release sales were more profitable than the total sales of their 2003 album, Hail To The Thief.

Without the hefty fees imposed by record labels, artists are offered a substantially larger profit margin, not to mention a large savings in distribution and manufacturing costs. Although The Slip was offered completely free of charge, 250,000 limited-editions discs were made for distribution in stores. And while the album profits are not available, given NIN’s extensive fan base it would not be surprising to see it generate a hefty sum.

Even if free digital downloads don’t serve to generate much money, they certainly drum up interest in concerts. Heralded for the complex sets and light shows, NIN’s “Lights in the sky over North America tour” (produced by Live Nation) sold out across 35 venues in North America, with the Dec. 8 show in Victoria selling out in under four minutes.

And Victoria fans weren’t disappointed. With NIN’s most star-studded line up yet (guitarist Robin Finck, keyboardist Alessandro Cortini, drummer Josh Freese and bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen) the amazing landscape of light was superseded only by the soundscape of an artist in his prime. At 43, Reznor is getting on in years for a rocker, but he still tears up the stage like an un-caged beast, sending mic stands into the air and spraying sweat onto the fans in the pit below.

The Victoria show started with the ethereal “999,999” seeing band members emerge slowly and unexpectedly from a strobe drenched wall of fog, only to jump into the driving “1,000,000” to get the crowd jumping.

“March of the Pigs” brought the crowd to critical mass, with the floor swelling and ebbing in a torrent of tightly-packed bodies eager to get closer to the source of their energy. Not bad for only being 15 minutes in. The mood soon changed to the rhythmic, sometimes abrasive, often groovy instrumentals from the Ghosts I-IV albums, accompanied by visuals that even Pink Floyd would be impressed by.

NIN would be playing on a stage resembling a shimmering oasis using only light, then just as instantly, hidden from view in a giant wash of black and white cable vision noise, peeking in and out of view. For “Echoplex,” Reznor walked out to a wall full of squares arranged in a grid. In Vana White fashion, he began to touch the squares, illuminating them, and in the process started the drum sample for the song, a marvellous combination of ear and eye candy.

The concert could be recounted in minute detail, without giving any real meaning to the experience — the magic of NIN can only be experienced in pounding chests, watering eyes and burning ears.

As the landscape of music changes around him, Reznor continues to blaze trails, not only in his music, but in the industry itself.