The Foo Fighters, Jack Johnson, Kanye West, Nine Inch Nails, and Stone Temple Pilots will headline 1999’s this year’s Virgin Mobile Festival, which takes place at the Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore on Aug. 9-10. More »
The new music-recommendation service Songkick–which sends out e-mail alerts to users when their favorite artists come to town, and uses a last.fm-like recommendation engine to tell its users about “similar artists” being out on tour–has developed a Battle Of The Bands application, which is sort of like Googlefight with the added nebulousness of using data from MySpace (like number of friends and number of song streams added per week) and Amazon. We put it to the test with three artists who have recently made headlines by using the Internet as part of their distribution strategy, and the results may surprise you:
Not content to sit back and mentally count the windfall from the first-week sales of his self-released opus Ghosts I-IV, Trent Reznor now has some words for Thom, Johnny, the bald one I always identified with, and the other two; since Trent’s venture into online retail was so successful and offered higher-quality audio downloads (as well as CDs and various special editions), he feels Radiohead may have rushed the downloadable In Rainbows to market in order to look cool for all us media types, rather than because they were honestly trying to push the Web-age sales model forward.
Canada adds another giant outdoor music festival thingee to 2008’s pile; running from July 25 to 27, the British Columbia-area Pemberton Festival will feature “bands such as Coldplay, Nine Inch Nails and the Tragically Hip.” Curse you, CanCon guidelines. More »
So the Nine Inch Nails frontman has released the first-week sales figures for Ghosts I-IV, the multiple-format instrumental album he self-released just two Sundays ago via his Web site. Given that the $300 super-mega-deluxe edition sold out its 2,500 copy pressing by the following Tuesday, even with a server snafu or twelve, it was clear that Trent was going to do pretty nicely for himself with this tweak to the newish model. But just how well did he do? Let’s go to the un-vetted press release!
Because snapping up $300 packages of new material might not be enough for the diehard faithful Nine Inch Nails luvvah these days, you, Trentoid of Reznoria, can now lend your Mac-editing-table talents to the cause that is Ghosts I-IV by placing your own visuals to his own music. Officially.
Whoops, I lied! Sorry. Looks like future failed A&R kingpin Perez Hilton has gone and voiced his concerns about the timeliness rumored Lollapalooza headliners Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead with his usual stinging brevity. (Total word count: 23. Total comments thus far: like, a lot.) But if you were expecting Perez’s loyal army of whatever-the-hell-you-call-people-who-read-Perez-Hilton (Perezzies? Please tell me it’s not Perezzies) to stand up to the NIN blog-reading loonies who will invariably descend on the PH comments box to rumble Sharks v. Jets/mods v. rockers/Marlo v. Avon/Mario v. Wario style, guess again. Turns out Perez’s readers are none too happy with their Manic Panic’d, polyester-pants’d Buddha’s sermonizing this time out. In fact, they’re kinda pissy.
Chicago Tribune music critic Greg Kot broke the news that Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are probably headlining this year’s edition of Lollapalooza on his blog, and the comment-section posturers were out in full force, hoping to let people know that they were, in fact, anonymously better than everyone else. To wit: “I paid $2 to see Radiohead in concert once back when I lived in NYC.”; “The secret sale tickets sold out in something like 13 minutes this morning. No wonder you missed it.”; and “Great! Can’t wait to spend over $200 to hear these normally great bands sound abnormally mediocre thanks to generic festival audio mixing! Yeepee!” But my favorite comment has to be the one that was in response to someone trying to make a feeble joke about Radiohead’s first big hit–you know, the one that they released when they were merely a bunch of 120 Minutes also-rans:
The 2,500-copy limited-edition run of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV–priced at $300, and packaged with a four-LP set and two Giclée prints–has sold out. More »
In case you’re having problems getting through to its official site, Trent Reznor’s quadruple album Ghosts I-IV is also available via Amazon’s MP3 store, where the DRM-free MP3s will set you back $5, just like Reznor intended. More »
