Nine Inch Nails – Leaps And Bounds

We are still pretty excited about Wilco (the Album), the seventh album by the Chicago outfit Wilco. Last week they released a stream of their album in response to the album leaking. They have a great track record for being proactive with fans. There’s usually entire gigs streaming off the site.

So it’s no surprise that Wilco are joining the iPhone app club. It’s a pretty basic app – a recreation of the band’s website essentially. Instead of bieing knocked out be the functionality or originality, we are struck by how standard this is.

EVERY BAND SHOULD BE DOING THIS.

We are expecting to see more of these. More and more mid level bands are getting into iPhone Apps. And there are now many companies who can build you something on the cheap. The flood is still on the way.

It’s a start for Wilco. Now their fans (of which many are super-dedicated) now have another way to communicate directly with fans. Maybe it will follow on the great stuff Nine Inch Nails did with their iPhone app. The NIN one is loaded with music, videos and I can even find NIN fans near me right now. Shockingly cool.

That said, there is a now a NIN branded iPhone game, a version of Tap Tap Revenge. There is also Coldplay and Dave Matthews Band versions. What these do for anyone, we don’t know.

Wilco iPhone App – here

Nine In Nails iPhone App – here

UPDATE: We were sad to hear about Jay Bennet. RIP.

We haven’t really listened to his music since the Downward Spiral. But we still follow Trent Reznor’s career as a pioneer in the digital playground. The man is in the press a lot. So, follow us as we take a stroll through some of Trent Reznor’s other greatest hits.

1. NIN Access – the Nine Inch Nails iPhone App. It’s pretty great actually. Solid, well made, with plenty of news, videos, forums, messages and more. Pioneering but not groundbreaking, this app is so fantastically functional it should be standard for bands.

2. Even after the success of the app, he’s not resting quiet. Just this week, he’s been a vocal critic of Apple’s app store rejection policies.

3. Attacking Chris Cornell on Twitter. The man even uses the latest tech to insult his contemporaries. The full tweet -“You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus,”.

4. Forget a t-shirt or a sticker. The tie-in for the album Year Zero was a video game.

5. He’s going to go down as a pioneer of direct-to-fan packages. His last album, the Slip, was announced on his website and sold 250K limited edition versions.

6. Beyond the deluxe versions, he offers his albums five different audio formats. The lowest quality is VBR V0 MP3, followed by two lossless formats, FLAC and Apple Lossless. Also released were 24-bit, 96 kHz FLAC and WAV files. And why the hell not.

7. He produced Saul William’s 2007 album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! He also distributed by his standard new age method. It was offered both for free in a low quality version and a paid version for high quality. And complained loudly when no one paid for the better one.

8. When he saw the prices of the CDs in Australia, he openly attacked his record company from the stage. He actively encouraged his fans to steal his music. The man is a rebel.

9. Alongside the regular studio albums, there’s more experimental pieces like Ghosts I-IV and remix albums like Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

10. Hey, and somehow the man found time to get engaged to his sweetheart Mariqueen Maandig of West Indian Girl (and looks like he saw the Star Trek movie too).

Bonus 11th point! His new collaboration with Jane’s Addiction is called…NINJA. So great.

So, Trent Reznor, we salute you for being such a crazy new age old coot. Congratulations for the wedding. Give us more madness soon.

Tag: Nine Inch Nails

Wilco (the OK iPhone App)

Trent Reznor: A primer