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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]

Radiohead has come up with yet another great gimmick for promoting their latest single, Nude. Nude is currently available on iTunes in bits and pieces called stems, which can then be used to create a remix of the song. The remixed tracks should be uploaded to Radiohead’s web site for the music-loving public to vote upon. The available stems are bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. With these, anyone can do a remix of Radiohead’s latest single and get a chance to wow the crowd.

This is made possible with iTunes and GarageBand, a built-in music-editing program found on Mac’s. Those who buy the whole package containing the 5 stems during the first week even get an access code to a GarageBand file that’s directly accessible with their computer. This is exciting, and at the same time a great opportunity for budding mixtape artists. I knew I should’ve paid more attention in music class!

Via [iPodNN]

Music bands are definitely recognizing the power of the Internet and other web hangouts as a promotional tool for their music. Nine Inch Nails, who were over whelmed by the success of the launch of their web friendly album Ghosts is conducting a film festival using YouTube with the hopes of strengthening its fan base on the web.

Similarly, another band Radiohead, fresh from the success of the release of their album In Rainbows, who used a pay-what-you-like-download is undertaking another step towards unfamiliar routes for radio-friendly bands. This time, Radiohead wants to mobilize its fan base for the production of their next music video. Radiohead in cooperation with Aniboom is sponsoring a contest in search of the best storyboard to use for their next music video. Winner takes home $10,000 plus the opportunity to work with Radiohead in producing the music video.

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With a very web friendly release for their latest album, which in turn saw a great amount of success, Nine Inch Nails has taken the Ghosts ‘project’ one step further. In a recent post on the official NIN website, Trent Reznor first begins by thanking everyone for the albums success and then quickly goes on to announce that they are taking another step forward in creating a community around this album.

Today we announce the expansion of the Ghosts project into the visual world. This record began as an experiment with us using sound as a means to describe visuals. Early in the project we thought it would be interesting to see what the community could create / collaborate on as a reaction to the music we were making. We wanted to keep the canvas as blank as possible for you, hence the lack of descriptive song titles and the primarily textural artwork and packaging.

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It seems Trent Reznor was right on with his latest album release for Ghosts I-IV. Based on “confirmed” reports the album has seen sales totaling 800,000 during the first week of its release, which in turn brought in $1.6 million. The 800,000 total included all forms of the album, including the free version which was Ghosts I, along with a combination of the other four available paid options. The paid options ranged in price from $5 for 36 DRM-free downloadable tracks to a $300 limited edition box set.

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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]

In a move that is not all that surprising, especially after Trent Reznor had confirmed being an OiNK user himself, Nine Inch Nails (NIN) have confirmed the legality of uploading and are actually encouraging the sharing Ghosts I. They have in fact not only made Ghosts I available for free directly from their own website, but also uploaded the 9 tracks (or torrents) to other places to include The Pirate Bay, What.cd and Waffles.fm. Not only was Ghosts I uploaded, the tracks were also uploaded as a nice high quality 320kpbs LAME encoded album. Of course I am fairly certain that any NIN fan will quickly shell out the $5 to purchase the complete collection, which also is available in a variety of formats.

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Nine Inch Nails has released their latest collection of music in a very web friendly format. Giving current fans and potential new fans a wide variety of choices to purchase the music in just about any way that you would like to get it. The new music is a 5 set collection that includes 36 tracks in total, and Trent Reznor is giving you options ranging from purchasing the whole collection as a fancy box set down to getting the first nine-tracks as DRM-free MP3’s for free.

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