Remix and Share!
May 7, 2008Trent Reznor will not stay out of the free culture spotlight! remix.nin.com takes a sizable portion of Nine Inch Nails’ back catolog and allows registered users to download original multi tracks, which they can then remix however they want. The only “rules” are that users share their creations on the site and that they not include any copyrighted material (unless they own the copyright). According to the FAQs on the site, users may include any Nine Inch Nails song (which I’m assuming includes songs not included on the site) in their remixes.
The band has done this on a smaller scale in the past - the release of “The Hand that Feeds” in Garageband format was something of a first, although they experimented with a flash-based music editing system on a previous project (according to the note from Trent included with the download of “The Hand that Feeds”).
The band is also collecting geographical statistics from users (not required, but encouraged) for future “visualizations” that they claim will be “really cool.” We’ll see what that means. I’m hoping they’re planning on showing the record industry just how many people are willing to be a part of culture when they’re allowed to participate, instead of being treated like slaves and criminals.
Anyway, here’s a band who is not only giving away their music for free, but letting people remix and share it. I’ll be paying close attention to how well “The Slip” does when they finally release the physical CD… I’m going to propose, as a hypothesis, that it’s going to do really well, in spite of the millions of people who will have already downloaded it for free. We’ll see how the RIAA feels about that.
