That's exactly what you'll find, right now, if you head over there. Just a few weeks ago, Reznor and company released an album directly to the internet with a obscurely poetic rant decrying the situation of commercialized music distribution and digital rights.
In Monday's blog post, Trent describes an ongoing project he's had with re-mixing communities on the Internet, where he released the master recording files on the band's website in an experiment to see what would come out of it. The results were very pleasing to Trent, and he found what independent artists have known for several years now: if you're hard up for a sequel album, release your recording masters to talented techno dj's, and bam, you've got a follow up album with a unique but familiar sound.
He liked it so much that he wanted to create an officially sanctioned community around the remixing of NIN music, but ran into a fair amount of opposition from his record label. You may have heard of these guys: Universal.
They're currently involved with lawsuits against Google and News Corporation alleging that they've built businesses around exploiting the safe harbor provision of the DMCA, and that by setting up a user generated content community for NIN, they'd be culpable for that same type of action.
That doesn't mean they don't think it's a great idea, though. They encouraged Reznor to move ahead with the project, but under the NIN brand, and ensured that should any DMCA allegations be brought against Universal, they would disavow all knowledge of the topic, and say that the band itself is culpable for the community violations.
Understandably, Reznor is a bit hesitant to launch it under his own name, and while he doesn't specifically ask for legal advice, reading between the lines of his post, it seems that he might be open to a clever scheme that would prevent the pants from being sued off him.
[via NIN.com]