In a continued effort to give the recording industry the middle finger, Nine Inch Nails (NIN) are giving away their new album “The Slip” for free. It is an interesting wager; NIN are betting that that this will increase their standing with fans who will be more likely to support the band by going to concerts and buying snazzy NIN merchandise… business areas where the band sees a much larger share of the revenue than CD/MP3 sales.

The album seems to be an good effort, though it feels like Trent has grown past earnest angst and rage and moved on to just creating interesting music. To me, The Downward Spiral stands alone as his masterpiece.

Of note is that this album (like Ghosts I-IV) is licensed under creative commons. This means that audio and video hobbyists like yours truly can use the songs in any non-commercial creative work as long as credit is given to the artist, in this case Mr. Reznor. This is awesome, as I hate it when I want to use a particular song in a video but am afraid the MPAA will knock down my door as soon as I post it online.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out; I sincerely hope that the economics work so well for NIN that they inspire other bands to follow in their footsteps. Maybe I should buy a t-shirt…