In the past decade, Nine Inch Nails have earned more notice for how they release their records than the songs that are actually on them. In his attempts to reach audiences beyond his faithful base of goths and gamers, Trent Reznor has embraced both high concepts (2007’s interactive song-cycle Year Zero) and low overhead (2008’s self-released offerings Ghosts I-IV and The Slip); even a guy who got famous by screaming needed a good news hook to get himself heard over the incessant din of a quick-click online-music marketplace. For his latest Nine Inch Nails release, Reznor is resorting to the most radical release strategy an independent-minded artist can employ in 2013: he’s re-signed to a major label. Those e-commerce experiments proved NIN can remain a viable business in the absence of corporate-funded marketing campaigns, but he presumably wants something that not even 100 per cent royalty rates can buy you: to be a game-changing pop cultural force once again. And despite what tech-topian industry analysts would have us believe, for the time being at least, traditional tools like global major-label distribution and aggressive radio promotion still often mean the difference between an artist being a household name or a merely respected one. pitchfork/reviews/albums/18443-nine-inch-nails-hesitation-marks/
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 06:03:55 +0000
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