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Nine Inch Nails Remix Thwarted Because Band Owns Copyright To Their Own Work

Confused by the title? You should be. Trent Reznor writes on NIN.COM that he had been planning on building a site, actually built the site and developed the back end, to allow his fans to upload their own remixes of Nine Inch Nail's music, only to be told by his label this might inadvertently violate his copyright and thus cannot do it. This is after a previous success led to an entire remix album featuring works of his fans being released by the Universal Music Group.

What is the problem? UMG is afraid of looking like hypocrites if unbeknownst to them, a fan uploads something that doesn't belong to them. They are in the process of suing MySpace and YouTube because fans have used their artists music in videos or splashed across their emo-ridden blog. Because we all know allowing angsty teen fans to show their favorite bands won't lead to them per se to buying more music but doing drugs and having underaged sex. Music labels acting irrationally? Never happens.

Several years ago I persuaded my record company to let me begin posting my master recording files on nin.com, in order to see what kind of user-generated content would materialize from my music. I had no agenda… the main reason I did it was because I thought it was cool and something I would have liked to do if it was available to me. A lot of really fun stuff started to happen….communities developed, web sites were created, even traditional radio got in the game and began playing the fans' mixes. I felt the experiment, despite not having a specific purpose, was a success. So much so that we're now releasing a remix album that includes some of this fan-created material as well as the actual multitrack master files for every song from my latest record, Year Zero.

One piece was missing to me and that was an official nin.com presence for aggregating all of the fan-created remixes. Several intrepid fans had stepped up and done a great job providing a destination for people to post these, but I felt all along this was a function I should more directly support. So, upon release of this new remix album, our plan has been to launch an official site on nin.com that would provide a place for all fan remix material and other interactive fan experiences.

Or so I thought.

Read more at http://www.nin.com/.

Speaking of the remix, in my opinion, it is a better piece of work than the last two studio albums and I love NiN. The remix albums have always been the most diverse bits of the nail's literature extending almost as far back as the original album when Al Jourgensen got ahold of a few tracks and merged them with Ministry goodness, all the way to the brilliant Aphex Twin 'remixes' that were more of a scavenging of Reznor's hard drives for unique textures that best represented the works of The Downward Spiral than a recreation of any one particular song.

On the Year Zero remix album, Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d, the remix comes full circle to the same genius that pieces feel like old-skool NIN where as others sound poppy and mainstream like "The Great Destroyer", and then onto the stunning Kronos Quartet cover of "Another Version of the Truth" remixed and arranged by Enrique Gonzalez Müller. I can't say that I liked the direction of Year Zero and felt it was a step away from what I as a listener thought of when I heard Nine Inch Nails, Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d brings it all back into the fold and my faith is once again restored in the band.

Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D CD/DVD Combo w / Multitrack Audio - $11.99

Y34RZ3r0r3mix3d 256kbps MP3 - $8.99

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