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Just as quickly as we learn that any new Radiohead tracks will soon require your wallet, Nine Inch Nails opens up with two free singles and then a complete album, all for free.

Following up on the success of Ghosts, Trent Reznor and his crew offered up both Discipline and Echoplex as singles, both of which are available as free downloads. While its nice to get the odd track for free we could not really expect to get a complete album, but that is exactly where they have gone.

The most recent release is the 10-track album called The Slip, and it is 100% free, both in terms of DRM and money. Its available for download in a variety of formats ranging from MP3 up to lossless and even if you wanted you cannot pay. Although Trent Reznor has been very public in the past about his dislike for the record industry, he has really been standing behind those words lately.

Read [NIN]

For the majority of you who paid nothing for Radiohead’s most recent album, In Rainbows, you may be sad to learn that the UK based band has no future plans to offer any similar promotion in the future.

Lead singer, Thom Yorke, called the revolutionary experiment a “one-off” thing.

“It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do,” Yorke told the Hollywood Reporter.” I don’t think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time.”

While Radiohead is calling this just a “moment in time” it seems some other artists, most recently Nine Inch Nails, have adopted and fully understand the free music theory. Hopefully, artists will continue to be as gratuitous as Radiohead has been in the past, as they move into the future.

Read [Reuters]

The Charlatans (here in the U.S. they would be called The Charlatans UK) have pulled a Radiohead and are initially making their latest album available to download for free! But unlike Radiohead, where fans had to decide how much they were willing to pay, the Charlatans’ offer comes with no such strings attached. There’s no guilt trip whatsoever! All right, there might be a bit of one when the Charlatans have the CD release of their album, which is their 10th and is called You Cross My Path, in a couple of months. You see, I downloaded the album and burned the songs to CD, so I already have my CD.

Maybe the Charlatans are hoping that fans won’t be burning the downloaded songs to CD and would still want to have the liner notes enough to buy the CD when it comes out. I guess since the Charlatans have been around for a while like Radiohead, they can afford to risk a hit to the pocketbook. OK, so here are the details. On the Xfm site you can download the whole album as a .zip file, or you can download the songs individually. The songs are MP3 files, so that’s thoughtful of the Charlatans in that they could still have had the songs be free but in a format that would not be compatible for everyone.  Anyway, thank you Charlatans and Xfm for your generosity!

Read [Xfm] Read [Tech.Blorge]