Trent Reznor fan of Bit Torrent, not a fan of iTunes

Trent Trent Reznor fan of Bit Torrent, not a fan of iTunes Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who recently paid the full asking price of Radiohead’s In Rainbows download, has recently ditched his record label in favour of doing ‘a Radiohead’ as it will no doubt be known from now on. Basically, he’ll be releasing his new work digitally without a label getting involved. So he must be a big fan of the old legal download then? Well… not so.
Reznor is… or should I say was… a big fan of the OiNK private BitTorrent tracker, until it was closed down. In a recent interview Reznor spilled the beans on why OiNK is loved by many, and iTunes leaves loads of people cold. He said “I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

Reznor continued “iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me. I don’t feel cool when I go there. I’m tired of seeing John Mayer’s face pop up. I feel like I’m being hustled when I visit there, and I don’t think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc. Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks.
“And that’s what’s such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they’re grateful for the person that uploaded it — they’re the hero. They’re not stealing it because they’re going to make money off of it; they’re stealing it because they love the band. I’m not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct, but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.”
This is the first time I can recall a big artist saying something like this. Does this mean there has been a shift in the way the music industry works? Are record labels becoming defunct? Or do artists still need the backing to get themselves into a position where they can be high profile and release records? Let’s not forget that the recording industry made us aware of NiN and Radiohead in the first place…
[via Wired]