With the buzz about Ghosts I-IV still going strong, Trent Reznor has dropped another bomb. Nine Inch Nails have just released another album - this one a full length with vocals titled The Slip - under Creative Commons license.

What’s different this time is that the entire album is available for free, even the ultra quality versions. There will be a physical release around July, we’re told, but unlike Ghosts you don’t have to buy something to get the CD-quality audio. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t something special in store for those who buy the physical media, much as they did for Ghosts.

The CC license - and its implications - are spelled out much more directly this time:

the slip is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

©2008 NIN

One thing he didn’t list, which is allowable under the license, is: use it as your soundtrack for your (noncommercial) film. How often has an established major artist made that offer to the public? And not just for a song or two, but for close to three hours of music in the past two months!!!

About a week or two ago, they’d released the first single, Discipline, directly to radio stations just hours after it had been mastered. That’s a turnaround time which has proven to be totally impossible under the old music model.

I should also mention that just prior to the release of Ghosts, they launched their own remix site dedicated explicitly to user remixes of their songs. (Since With Teeth in 2005, Nine Inch Nails have been releasing the multi-track files for their songs and encouraging listeners to remix them, a phenomenon which precipitated the creation of my Only remix and music video.) And shortly after Ghosts, they launched a YouTube festival of sorts, encouraging people to create videos for their music from that double album.

Oh, and don’t forget the whole ARG phenomenon surrounding the album Year Zero.

The whole thing is almost unbelievable. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a massive surge of productivity by a single musical artist in my lifetime, certainly not one where that artist is so hands-on with the details, nor one which is so cross-media in nature. And, for a fan like me, it’s all good good good.

Get The Slip for free at: http://theslip.nin.com/

Last night, while I was sifting through my Google Reader stack for the evening, a message came from a friend across a Gmail chat channel. “Microsoft has dropped the hammer.”

“Huh?”

“… just confirmed, Machinima.com is suspended from YouTube…”

Oh my. I needed to contact some people who are “in the know” and might be able to corroborate the rumor. Immediately, I powered up Skype to flag down Moo Money… no answer. Grrr, I fired up Twitter and sent an unintentionally overcryptic message to Johnnie Ingram, hoping he might be burning some midnight oil at the Short Fuze office… nothing. I emailed Hugh Hancock, “I think something big is going down…” He was probably in bed too.

Speculation was flying fast and furious about what circumstances had led to M.com’s legal troubles. We tried visiting their site, too, and found it unavailable. Holy crap, this is bigger than we thought. It must be some kind of all-encompassing Cease & Desist order! Is this the beginning of the end of game machinima?

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Sound Lantern is an interesting application of the user-generated content phenomenon. It takes the YouTube model, and applies it to the world of sound. Users are encouraged to upload sound effects, music, audiobooks, poetry… all things audio. It will be interesting to see how they deal with copyright challenges; what’s to stop people from turning the site into a hub for trading copyrighted works? Content creators already have venues like The FreeSound Project and Soundsnap, which appear to have stricter upload guidelines. YouTube is loaded with “found objects”… but then they’ve got staff and mechanisms in place to at least attempt to police material for infringement. I wonder how a new startup like Sound Lantern will handle that?

Apart from that, where a site like this might get really interesting is if it extends itself by way of RSS so someone can subscribe to Twitter-like podcasts of sound bytes. That would also enable someone to host their traditional podcasts there too. Right now, I’m not seeing any feeds there, but it’s something to watch for.

It all started with some minimalist blogs from the front man. The first, titled “?”, said only: “We have been very busy doing secret things. We’ll start to tell you about them soon.” Then “2 weeks“… “soon“… “tick tock, tick tock“… “2 hours.” Fans agonized and theorized… what was coming? Another ARG experience? Another collaboration? Another announcement?

What came was Ghosts volumes I through IV… a double-disc collection of Nine Inch Nails instrumental tracks of a variety of textures and tones. No advertising. No MTV hype. No record label. Direct to the public. And released under a Creative Commons license.

Whoa.

You can get 9 of the tracks for free, and then there are various tiers of commercial product you can purchase, each upping the merchandising factor from its predecessor. All the purchases include an immediate download of a high quality digital version of all of the songs.

It took me two hours to complete my purchase last night; their servers were getting annihilated by the traffic, which far exceeded even Trent’s high expectations.

When Radiohead did their In Rainbows release, T.R. had commented that it was a great concept, but could be executed so much better. Now we know what he had in mind.

It’s utterly brilliant. And the music is a delight, the more ethereal bits reminiscent of the Quake soundtrack from so many years ago, but with more sonic depth. Definite headphones / eyes closed material.

Congratulations, Nine Inch Nails. I hope this venture is as big a success as it is appearing to be.

1. Behind the Workflow: Unreal Tournament 3 on CG Society. (they also have a little write-up on the design of Team Fortress 2)
2. Machinima For Dummies - 2007 Year in Review (part 1 and part 2). A thought-provoking read.
3. Machinima For Dummies - Hugh and Johnnie’s favorite machinima from 2007
4. Creating a Second Life Sculpted Prim with WINGS3D, a great video tutorial by Paulee Perenti
5. How to Create a 4-Legged Animal in iClone tutorial by Paul Louis (MyClones for iClone)
6. DiVAS, a new comedy series by Phaylen. Perhaps the most effective comedy I’ve seen executed in Second Life. 2 episodes so far, more to come.
7. Mike Jones on Writing for Sound. Episode 3 of his Motion Sketches video series, produced in cooperation with Celtx. Essential, insightful advice for video producers.
8. Blahbalicious on Stage6 - A timeless classic from the earliest days of machinima, as good as it has ever looked (since it was watched in the Quake engine itself). *You may have to be logged in to Stage6 to even see the vid; contains adult language.

See also:

• OverByte #4
• OverByte #3
• OverByte #2
• OverByte #1

For some reason, whenever the question of “monetizing” machinima is raised, inevitably the discussion turns to business models built around the idea of selling the machinima videos themselves. And rightfully, concerns are raised about whether the viewing public is ready for a pay-per-episode machinima release. After all, TV episodes are available on iTunes, and we all know at least a little bit about Rooster Teeth.

But upon closer inspection, it turns out that in both the case of network television on iTunes and Red vs. Blue on DVD, the episodes themselves are all available for free in some venue or another… and as such, I would argue that it’s not actually the videos themselves which are the product being sold here, and to assume in a world where YouTube exists that people would pay solely to watch videos is, well, it’s just not realistic. What to do, then?

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