Trent Reznor and open source

Posted by Brian on 5 March 2008

A couple days ago, Trent Reznor, the brains behind Nine Inch Nails, released a new album. This is the first album he's released since he left the major record label under which he was contracted. He's long been a proponent of more independently-created music specifically as it relates to musicians having to sign onerous contracts just to get a record out. That was the old way of doing things. 

For the past year at least, Trent Reznor's been talking about how he wanted to offer his audience different options for experiencing his music, all of which would be high-quality (he rightly wants control over the production quality of his music). If you go to his new site Ghosts you can see he offers five options ranging from free to $300 USD for experiencing his new album via download, cd, vinyl, etc. Well, there are only four options now that the $300 limited edition vinyl-and-gyclee-print package is sold out. He also mentions on the site quite a bit about how the overall process went. Fascinating stuff.

So how does this relate to open source? One of the ways you can buy the new album is to pay $75 USD and you get the album on cd, a hi-def audio dvd, and a dvd with all songs on the album in multi-track format (and a bunch of cool packaging & pictures). You can then load up Apple's Garage Band or some other music sequencing software with the "source files" of the music from the album. Even though you have to pay to get the multi-track files, it's still open source. And it's a far sight more open than anything I've seen from other popular musicians.

We at SilverStripe care a lot about new business models (such as what Trent is doing) especially when the original author of the content cares deeply about giving people an awesome experience at a variety of price points, including free.