08 October 2007: Big News
Hello everyone. I've waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.
posted by Trent Reznor at 10:45 AM.
EEK! Trent's totally on his own now and I couldn't be more psyched about the future. We can talk 'til the cows come home about what his new artistic direction might be but what I find myself completely fascinated with right now is how a person (or group) would be able to pull this off from a monetary standpoint. Obviously Trent's going to be saving some money because he's got his own studio that should be pretty well equipped with all the newest gadgets from the Year Zero and [With_Teeth] albums so no out of pocket expense for studio time. Hell he could probably make a bit of cash by selling out his own studio time if he felt like it. And there are still the royalty checks coming in from all the other albums. And I'm sure there's loads of other income sources that I couldn't even begin to imagine but what concerns me is how do you do the world tour and US tours when there's not a record label to shell out that kind of cash for you? What do you use as collateral? Your music catalog? Your studio/equipment/etc? Your soul? And just what is fair market value for an old industrial rocker's soul these days?
It also makes me wonder about record contracts and how much they generally cover in expenses and therefore what Trent will now be picking up on his own. I mean how far did Interscope have their hands into things like the tour merchandise verses how much Trent had to do with it this last time around (and subsequently the profits from said merchandise)? We all know the first website was found on the back of a t-shirt. Interscope wouldn't have had anything to do with that if this was prior to Trent letting them in on the ARG setup. SO how long has he been studying this to make it on his own? Was the whole ARG game just a test run to see how much pull he had with the internet fans? I guess this is kind of getting away from my original point of how Trent or any of the other bands who are starting in on this "label free" bandwagon are going to make it. And, if they're successful, how is this going to change the scene for other people/bands starting out. These are exciting times and I've just got oodles of questions!
