Earlier this evening, a Twitter message alerted me to the Ghosts instrumental album that was released by Nine Inch Nails today, completely announced. I had been curious about Trent Reznor’s plans, as he had previously voiced his discontent with (and freedom from) the music industry.

So when I checked out Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts website, I was not disappointed. First of all, there’s the music itself. Ghosts I – IV is an instrumental music collection – a first for NIN. I was able to listen to it right on the website, and based on my initial impression, this is quite possibly the best material that NIN has released in a long time (I wasn’t a big fan of any of their albums after the 1994 release of The Downward Spiral). It certainly sounds like great music to code to, so I’m uploading it to my iPod for tomorrow.

But more important is how the music is being made available. The first 9 tracks (Ghosts I) are available as a free download, in 320kbps mp3s, as well as a 40-page PDF booklet. The full 36 tracks (Ghosts I – IV) can be purchased on the website for the extremely fair price of $5. A 2 CD set will be released for $10 on April 8 for those that prefer physical media. In addition, a deluxe edition and ultra-deluxe limited edition are also available for $75 and $300 respectively for those that have way too much money to spare…

On a slightly sour note, the NIN website appears to have been hammered when I tried to download Ghosts I. But a few tweets later I found out that Ghosts is also available for download on Amazon (for the same price of $5), which suffered from no such issues.

What is interesting is that it’s not just the music distribution mechanism that is changing. It is also how music is being discovered and marketed. As far as I am aware, there was no marketing around this release, or even any sort of formal announcement. Instead, music is being discovered virally, by word of mouth, blogs, and even Twitter. Interesting times!

Folks, I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”. We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet ) Terry Pratchett PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

Terry Pratchett has been one of my favorite authors ever since I first discovered his Discworld series about 20 years ago, and his cheerful satirism has made my life richer numerous times. I wish him all the best and sincerely hope he pulls through this.

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

Whatever you may think of their music (I for one am a big fan of their old stuff, but not so much of anything that was released after the amazing Downward Spiral album), but this is exciting news. I definitely liked Nine Inch Nails better before they went mainstream, but now I’m quite happy they took this route, as they’ll be able to have a much bigger impact on the industry. With acts like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead demonstrating that it is entirely possible to bypass the music industry, I sincerely hope that times are about to change…

I hadn’t bothered to pick up the latest Nine Inch Nails album (Year Zero), but after this I felt compelled to download it from Amazon’s music store.

There’s also some interesting coverage of this (along with tons of comments) on TechCrunch and Gizmodo (not even counting the > 1000 comments on the Nine Inch Nails home page).

Even though it’s been a while since a new Amazon feature has blown me away, I have to say I am very impressed with amazonmp3! They only offer DRM-free music in MP3 format, generally encoded using 256kbps. The website is laid out well, all songs are previewable, it is fast, and the navigation is well-thought-out and conveniently enables both searching and browsing for music. The catalog is reasonably large (and I assume it will grow over time as they sign up new labels), and among other things I have been able to find a fair selection of obscure European Industrial bands (although amazonmp3 often only seems to have a single album of these bands, not their whole discography). Individual songs generally cost $0.89, although a few songs cost $0.99. Given that all songs are DRM-free, this compares quite favorably to iTunes Music Store’s $1.29 for DRM-free songs. Most albums cost $8.99, a few cost $9.99, and I have been able to find a lot of albums for as little as $6.99, including German imports that would have cost $16 in CD-format on Amazon.com!

The purchase experience is simple and straightforward in usual 1-click Amazon style. amazonmp3 has a nice free downloader app (currently only Mac and Windows, but supposedly a Linux version is being worked on) that makes it very easy to download entire albums. If desired, it even automatically adds the downloaded songs to your iTunes library. The downloader is optional; individual songs can also be manually downloaded from the website.

As you can tell, I am quite excited about this new service, and I think I’ll make this my standard mechanism for acquiring music from now on (assuming it is available in their catalog). I will still check out some of the other music stores I previously wrote about, as sites with an affordable subscription model might be more economical for regular downloads, but in the mean time I’m glad I now have a convenient way to buy DRM-free music on Amazon.

So I was happy to see that a bunch of new options for buying DRM free songs are springing up. Many years ago when they first launched, I bought some music from eMusic (but mainly because this was at the height of the dot-com boom and at the time they were giving away crazy expensive things for free with any music purchase, such as a nice set of Logitech speakers and a Creative MP3 player). Since then they have switched to a subscription model, but I haven’t checked them out lately. From what I hear, their catalog is quite large, particularly with music from smaller labels. Unfortunately it seems to be impossible to view their catalog without signing up for a subscription, which is rather annoying. Still, I might give them another try.

Another site I found via the Techcrunch article is Audio Lunchbox. They seem to have quite a large collection, and I was happy to recognize many small Industrial / Electronic artists that I was familiar with. Their prices are comparable to iTunes ($9.99 per album), but all the songs are DRM-free MP3s (encoded with 192kbps VBR, which is adequate for my purposes). Their website allows individual songs to be previewed, but unfortunately the interface is clunky (for example you cannot jump to a particular song by clicking on it; instead, you have to click “forward” until you get to it) and you can only listen to the first 30 seconds of each song. Why not offer the whole song for preview, but in lower audio quality? It is usually difficult to judge a song by its beginning. Still, these minor issues aside, Audio Lunchbox looks very promising and I will keep this in mind. I would prefer slightly lower pricing ($5-$7 seems reasonable for an entire album), given that I can buy a CD for $13 at Amazon, but at least it is DRM-free.

One thing I was very surprised reading is that two of the music stores (WalMart and gBox) are apparently only compatible with Windows. How somebody can try to build a business on the web and be so ignorant of other platforms is beyond my comprehension…

Some of my favorites:

The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?

The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing. Recently, an RIAA representative reportedly suggested that “students drop out of college or go to community college in order to be able to afford [P2P lawsuit] settlements.” Do you stand by this advice? Is this really good advice for our children’s futures?

DRM has clearly failed to stop songs from getting on file sharing networks, but it does prevent me from moving lawfully purchased music onto my iPod and other portable devices. Unlike the major record labels, many popular indie labels offer mp3 downloads through sites like eMusic. Why won’t you let fans purchase mp3s as well?

The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios’ bottom line in any significant way?

There are plenty of other good points on the site.

(via BoingBoing)

The first Pragmatic Friday title Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby by Caleb Tennis is available for download now, at the price of $8.50.

I think this is a great idea. I thoroughtly enjoyed the Pragmatic Starter Kit books on version control, unit testing, and automation. At 150 to 200 pages, they were very readable and acted as a great tutorial on the respective subjects. They obviously did not cover all the details but provided enough of a foundation to enable the reader to easily dig deeper into the topics by using web resources, etc. I have a very low attention span when it comes to books, and these are one of the few books that I’ve actually read cover to cover. The Pragmatic Fridays seem to take this a step further by being more limited in scope, which I think has a great potential. And the $7.50 – $10 price point definitely seems very reasonable.

Other Pragmatic Fridays titles in the pipeline include “Ruby Best Practices”, “Google Maps API”, and “Preparing Rails Applications for Deployment”. The Pragmatic Programmers are also accepting proposals, in case you are interested in writing a Friday yourself. This might be an interesting opportunity for would-be writers.

At $9.99, the price is reasonable (the current price for the CD at Amazon is $15.98), but I’d like to see this drop closer to $5. Still, this is definitely a step in the right direction and I wish more bands would go this route. Downloadable music on iTunes or similar sites is not an option for me, as I refuse to pay for DRM-crippled music.

(On the down side, the Project Pitchfork homepage uses menus that don’t work in Firefox… You’ll have to use IE to use these. The Shop itself, which is hosted by MusicDock, works fine in Firefox.)

If you’re a fan of the Hitchhiker’s Guide and Douglas Adams and want to find out more about both, I strongly encourage you to pick up both “Don’t Panic” and “The Salmon Of Doubt” , which contains many previously unpublished items such as essays, speeches, and of course the unfinished story Douglas was last working on.

On that note: It’s been a few years, I think it may be time to re-read the Hitchhiker’s Guide books again…

The story mainly covered the first two books. However, while large parts of the books were (understandably) not part of the movie, a substantial part of the movie’s story was made up just for the movie and did not come from any of the previous incarnations of the story, which I found very odd, given the huge amount of suitable and arguably much more relevant story elements that were already available. This includes the rescue of Trillian from the Vogons, the much more emphasized (in true Hollywood style) love story between her and Arthur, etc. The vogons were done very well, but their role seemed exaggerated in an attempt to show off the nice work of the Jim Henson puppets. There were also many inconsistencies between the movie and the books (for example Deep Thought wasn’t actually on the planet Magratea), although I’m more willing to forgive these in the name of artistic license.

On the positive side, I liked the way the guide was presented. Most of the actors were good fits for their roles. Martin Freeman was a very good choice for Arthur Dent, and even though I initially had some concerns, Mos Def was a pretty good Ford Prefect. Sam Rockwell as Zaphod Beeblebrox was quite good as well, even though he always strikes me as a Mike Myers wannabe…

Overall, good enough for an entertaining evening, but definitely not the movie that I expected (and that I had been waiting for since I first read the books close to 20 years ago…)