The claim that Trent Reznor is singlehandedly fixing the music industry is a bit  far-fetched, but NIN‘s first release after leaving their major label is a very ambitious step in the right direction. Not only is a part of the album available for free and Ghosts a DRM-free download (including a lossless FLAC encoded version), but also is it licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike!

When I first bought Ghosts, I was bit disappointed that the tracks have no names – even though I really like the album. Somehow that seemed loveless. But then I learned that this was done on purpose, so that contributors to the NIN YouTube Ghosts Film Festival could start visualizing what they hear from scratch without being influenced by the title of the song. The people out there have contributed more then 600 videos until now and some of them are very well done.

Now if only Google burnt even more money on YouTube – their performance  is really tedious sometimes.