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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]

As a man of twenty five I am comfortable saying that the most challenging, and truly self discovering journey of my life was the transference from CD to digital music. A process that took months of short activity spurts and endless accumulated hours of musical rediscovery from the very depths of my musical collection (talking about Morris Day & Time, and Hanson in one sitting). In the end, like Highlander, “there could be only one” device that is. My trusty iPod, filled with every song I have ever loved up until next new release Tuesday. All in all I tore through 572 CD’s, all colorful and slick, some with scratches, others with little dots indicating that they were not long for this world. 

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If you’re tired of missing your favorite TV shows or never have the time to watch TV recordings or movies at home because you’re always on the go, then the SanDisk V-Mate is for you! It can record video from a TV, cable, satellite or over-the-air, set-top-box, DVD player, personal video recorder, like TiVo, or a VCR. The V-Mate memory card can then be inserted into a mobile phone, video music player, hand-held game console, or notebook computer and the video replayed. Memory cards supported include SD, MMC, MMCplus MMCmobile, SDHC, MiniSDHC, MicroSDHC, Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick PRO Duo.

• Watch whatever you want whenever and wherever you want!


• View favorite TV shows or movies during your daily commute


• Catch those late night TV shows you always miss or the latest episode of your favorite reality show during your lunch break


• Digitize your home videos


• Share favorite video content with family and friends

A remote control and TV-based graphical user interface let users control settings, record and access content. At initial set-up users select their playback device (such as a mobile phone or handheld game) to ensure the recordings are playback-compatible. It has a maximum recording resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. Recording time is approximately 3.6 hours in a mobile phone (at bit rate of 544kbps) and 1.8 hours on a notebook computer (at bit rate of 1.056kbps).

There is a mini-USB connection and cable to connect to a personal computer and it is expected in October for $129.99.

Product Page [SanDisk] Via [Techworld]