The Slip

So several really neat things happened today.

First I woke up to an email from nin.com about a ticket pre-sale for the fall tour. They must have kept my email address from when I bought Ghosts. It was just really nice to be informed about a pre-sale by the band itself, instead of having to depend on other outlets. The pre-sale itself is also sweet, because every ticket requires a real name (which will be printed on it) to match an ID the night of the show. This means no scalpers (and no Ticketmaster)!

When I went to register for the pre-sale, I was also pleasantly surprised that a new album was released this morning. It's a free full-length album, offered in mp3/aac/flac/wav, and for once the high quality downloads are torrent files. Finally, someone gets it! When he released Ghosts he partnered with Amazon because of load concerns, and even then he had scaling problems. Either the mass public hasn't caught on yet, or (more likely) the torrents mean no scaling issues, because my experience was flawless. I had the music downloaded and was listening to it in less than a minute.

It would be nice if other artists embraced this model. Music is such a pleasant experience when it is offered DRM-free in multiple formats, easy to get, at a modest price. Today's release happened to be free, but I have gladly paid $5 for both Ghosts and Niggy Tardust, and I'll probably continue to do so. Paying $15 in a store for an outdated format that wastes valuable physical space (a CD) just doesn't compare. Today's release doesn't have the same tiered model that Ghosts did, but I hope in the future they all do, because I think that was brilliant too. I mean, he made like a million dollars in one week on that... you can't tell me the labels pay that well.

Anyway, go check out The Slip.