Coldplay: "We're rich, beyotch!"

The growing consensus in the music business these days is that the money is now in touring, and that recorded music will continue to lose value. Big shots like NIN and Radiohead are giving away whole albums for free, and a number of notable other are dipping toes into the same pool...a track at a time. Coldplay, for example, gave away "Violet Hill" from their upcoming Viva La Vida for a week. It's pretty good.

But if the money's in touring, then why is Coldplay also giving away every single ticket to their upcoming shows at Madison Square Garden (click here) and Brixton Academy (click here)? Simple. Because they're rich.

Reality check: nobody reads blogs

On one hand, it's not news to me that the traffic on most good blogs hovers just above embarrassing: the traffic of this blog has yet to poke its nose out from under atrocious. On the other hand, if you spend as much time as I do clicking around the Internet in search of everything in particular, you start to believe that you're not the only one in the world that actually reads shit and clicks on shit and consumes at least some of the information you stumble across on a daily basis. You begin to think that everyone else processes stimuli in the same way that you do.

Trent Reznor went and disclosed the numbers behind the great Niggy Tardust experiment. Aside from being a brilliant move to get people talking about the record again*, his screed shocked me not for its admissions that even the people in this business who know the most what they're doing still have no idea what they're doing, but for the underwhelming numbers contained within.

I agree with most of the Internet, including this guy, that Trent's reasoning is a bit specious as far as who those downloads represent, and I think even if his assumptions are correct, an 18.3% conversion rate isn't half bad. The number that shocked me was the total downloads.

Granted, there wasn't a front page piece in the Times about the record, but when a guy like Trent Reznor gets behind a project by a great artist with a name like this one had, and it's released the way this one was, people pick up on the story. In case you never did, you can (but you won't) read about it here. For a while, this was the buzz of the blogs. Saul Williams enjoyed top billing on elbo.ws, and useless exposure on Technorati.

And after all that huffing and puffing, just over 150,000 people downloaded a record for FREE!? I guess I just thought there were more people like me on the Internet. People who read about something on a site they trust, and try it. Especially something very likely to be cool -- especially something entirely, legitimately, free.

But maybe not. Maybe nobody reads anything because they're too busy fighting over who commented first, and all the traffic that keeps your favorite blogs in business is just the result of great keywords hidden in mountains of back content, and irresistibly clickable ads.

When I was a boy, we had to ride our 14.4k modems uphill both ways to get to the Internet. These whippersnappers are taking the web to hell in a handbasket.

...

An anecdote to bring my point home: this particular site enjoys a small but consistent trickle of traffic from people Googling for "naked in the bath" and finding this post (even more from now on, I suppose). Unsurprisingly, they don't stick around very long. But once in a while, they click on an ad.


* I'm playing right into your hands, you clever bastard.

Listen to NIN's Year Zero

I've made no secret of my admiration for the way Trent's been managing the pre-release buzz of this record. It's up now streaming (in surprisingly high quality) at yearzero.nin.com (in the upper right corner) so you can listen to it and see what all the fuss is about.

What I've kept a little more secret is that I've never really spent much time with NIN in the past. In fact, truth be told, I always thought NIN enjoyed a special breed of hype shared by the likes of Beck and Kid A-era Radiohead. That is to say, it's good, but it's really not THAT good. Seeing Trent do it live last summer changed my mind. And listening to this new record is reaffirming that shift. This shit is that good.

Make sure to listen to "The Good Soldier" and "Capital G."

The stuff of nightmares

Ever since Mr. Reznor did the sound for Quake (the first game I remember actually screaming out loud at out of fright), and really ever since I heard my first NIN record, I've known he could be...dark. But the marketing that's beginning to swell around NIN's Year Zero (out 4/17/07) is some of the creepiest/awesommest shit I have ever seen/read/heard.

What you need to know, I guess, is that Year Zero takes place in a not-so-distant future, in which the American government has taken some extreme measures in the name of freedom and security. See iamtryingtobelieve.com and artisresistance.com to get a sense of what I'm talking about here.

What's cool about this isn't the post-apocalyptic it-can-happen-here thing (okay, that's cool too). It's the way all this is slowly coming together, and how much planning must have gone into it ahead of time. iamtryingtobelieve.com was discovered as a result of some highlighted letters on an overseas tour t-shirt. And then there was a USB thumbdrive discovered in a bathroom at a show containing a song and a strange .mp3 file that sounded like crickets until it was passed through a spectograph analyzer to reveal a phone number: 1-216-333-1810. Call it (be warned, it's extremely disturbing). And from there, head on to uswiretap.com/71839j/ for more insanity.

Imagine putting all this together. Trusting your fans enough to analyze a sound file to get that phone number (okay, so maybe you could have given them hints if they didn't figure it out on their own). I have never seen or heard of anybody promoting a record quite like this.

I've referred you here to a few things. Over at ninwiki.com, they have a much more complete account and more legible transcripts of these pages. I encourage you, fan of NIN or not, to check it out.

In other news, NIN has a DVD out very soon of last year's tour, which I caught and somehow failed to blog about. Probably too late now to rave about it, but believe me when I tell you that this will be worth a netflix'ing.

(nin.com), (myspace.com/nin)