• This is disturbing: When a TV reporter asked Mitch Winehouse how daughter Amy was doing, he replied "Fantastic, fantastic. Her boobs are great as well." Then he backtracked, "I shouldn't have said that should I?" And then he rambled on, "I didn't have to pay for the boobs" and went on to question how she got the cash for them. Apparently Amy is broke and begs him for money a lot. That is, unless she is still mega-rich and shelled out the reported $56K for that glorious rack by herself, which OK says is also a possibility. [OK]
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• Salman Rushdie rubbed salt in ex-girlfriend Pia Glenn's wound by showing up at a hoity-toity literary event with yet another raven-haired Amazonian goddess on his arm. This one is a Harvard grad who only dates models, which makes it oh-so-enigmatic why she'd date frumpy Rushdie. Hey, did I mention she's an aspiring writer? [Page 6]
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• When the deejay at 1Oak announced "23 bottles of Cristal for Lindsay Lohan's 23rd birthday," LiLo reportedly "look startled." Not because she is a recovering alcohol with a DUI under her belt, but because it totally wasn't her birthday, her birthday is on July 2nd! [Page 6]
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• Amber Lee Ettinger suffered "minor cuts" after a rogue lighting scaffold beamed her at that Thrillist-JetBlue junket that everyone went to but no one was supposed to talk about. Apparently the trip was "completely crazy," with freebie Trojan condoms flying everywhere, best all-inclusive junket spring break ever!! [Page 6]
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• The case against two men accused of extorting $25 million from John Travolta after son Jett's death has ended in a mistrial. The reason was as tabloid as the trial itself: the judge thought the jury pool was leaking information. The judge figured it out when a member of Bahamas' Parliament said he had inside knowledge that defendant Pleasant Bridgewater—a Bahamanian politician with a farcically adorable name—would be acquitted. [NYDN]
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• Jill Zarin & co. played on their cellphones and were generally bratty at the Memphis premiere. It would actually be pretty disappointing if she showed up somewhere and wasn't a nuisance. [Page 6]
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• There's a mistake on Jacko's will—or is the whole thing a forgery? Michael Jackson was in New York on July 7, 2002, the same day his will was signed in L.A. His lawyer says they simply wrote down the wrong date, which raises another troubling question: Why, when you are guiding the most famous man on the planet through the most important legal documents of his life, would you not bother to make sure you have the date right? [TMZ]
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• Trent Reznor, Roseanne Cash, Billy Bragg, and a bunch of other musicians are demanding federal documents explaining how their music was used during torture sessions at Gitmo. This is because they are dutifully liberal, highly enlightened, civic-minded folks who are only somewhat curious to know whether al-Qaeda operatives prefer Nine Inch Nails or country standards. [HuffPo]
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• Nicole Richie and Samantha Ronson are besties, and Lindsay Lohan is jealous. Nicole is taking the high road, though, and just "wants a better life" for LiLo, thereby employing the deepest and most cutting diss in the Mean Girl manual: Magnanimous pity. [Perez Hilton]

A great number of celebrities have found Twitter is a great way to communicate directly with the public, without filtering by the news media or a record company. In Reznor's case, his fan base consisted of a few too many angry, depressed people to make Twitter a pleasant experience.

It turns out the industrial rocker's fans weren't too happy when he started Twittering about the joys of being in love. And so he warned that he was going quit the Internet: "You are right, I'm not the same person I was in 1994 (and I'm happy about that). Are you?"

Rather than fade away as Dave Matthews seems to be doing, Reznor followed up on his threat by just cold deleting his account sometime within the past few days (he posted as recently as July 17). Which is especially startling since Reznor has been a pioneer in using the internet to distribute his music and connect with fans. He's now discovered that it's possible to connect too closely — and unlike internet fameballers trying to convert online fame into real celebrity, he doesn't have to pretend otherwise.

With Douglas Merrill's hiring of Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka at EMI, at least one label is wising up to the fact that making music more difficult to buy and find is no way to compete with online file sharing. Say what you will about Second Life, but within the context of the virtual world it was very easy to participate in the economy (maybe even a little too easy) and buy and sell ephemeral, digital goods.

Now that labels have realized that their core business will no longer be moving units through outlets like the now-defunct Tower Records, they're moving towards "360 degree" deals that ask for a piece of event income, licensing and merchandising. Which in the old model used to be the artist's bread and butter, as musicians didn't actually see much of a cut from album sales. The album was, as they say in Hollywood, a "tent pole" upon which other business opportunities were supported — and now the labels want the whole tent.

Reznor had the foresight to go independent as the old circus collapses around him. Owning his own production studio and promoting and distributing his content digitally means his costs are minimal. And production, promotion and distribution was exactly what labels used to lured artists into contractual cages. Reaching beyond the concept of moving units in mass volume and instead servicing hardcore fans with what they want, when and where they want it while making it easy for people to find and listen to his music, Reznor's got an opportunity to make a lot more money for himself than he ever would have with a label — and more creative flexibility as well.

"He wonders, in the songs on The Slip, whether he is irrelevant. The music revives Nine Inch Nails’ past, from stomping hard rock to dance-club beats to piano ballad to inexorably building instrumentals. Yet amid walloping drums and distorted guitars — the sounds of angry youth — Mr. Reznor ponders his place in the present. 'Start it up again like it matters anymore/I don’t know if it does,' he sings in '1,000,000.' Nine Inch Nails, Mr. Reznor said, is 'an aggressive, honest, naked, angry, ugly thing. I don’t hear anybody doing anything like that right now that I’m aware of. Maybe there are, but it doesn’t seem like it’s the flavor of today.' [...]

“The Slip was knocked out in three weeks of studio time after a month of songwriting. During the sessions he sent one song, 'Discipline,' to rock radio stations, which have given it Top 10 airplay. The new music, Mr. Reznor acknowledged, relies more often on reflexes than does an album like The Fragile (1999), on which every sound is painstakingly shaped; he said he expects his next project to take more 'editorial time.' With The Slip, however, he finished recording the songs on a Wednesday and completed mixing, mastering and graphics to release the album five days later. 'That was fun,' Mr. Reznor said. 'You never could have done that before.' [...]

“'These days I work too much, I think, because it makes me feel good,' Mr. Reznor said. 'I don’t know how to do that in a relationship. I don’t have a family. I’d like to have one. I just haven’t somehow gotten around to it yet. But I know that if I work, it’s likely I’ll come up with something I’m proud of and that gives me a sense of worth. Not for money or fame — it’s, I feel good about it. So like any good addict, if I find something that feels good, if that feels good, maybe doing twice as much feels twice as, you know...'" [NYT] [Photo: Kevin Scalon]

The concept is for you to take whatever tracks you feel inspired by from Ghosts and create what you feel should accompany them visually. You will be able to see all of the submissions, and a team of us (including me) will be sorting through them and setting aside ones we feel are exceptional. Eventually (within a couple of months?) we will present a virtual "film festival" with me and some special guests presenting selections of your work.

Don't get your hopes up for prize hardware or other material glory, Reznor adds; the most you can win is some schlubby YouTube love and maybe, if you're lucky, a spot in the backdrop at a one-time-only NIN performance of Ghosts. But the more ambitious among you can always take solace in your role as a grass-roots shill pushing the phenomenon as far into the dyed black as it can go, with only a couple hundred grainy cell-phone movies, some musty, goth-chick nostalgia and Mark Romanek's all-time great "Closer" video standing between you and cinematic immortality. Or you could always, you know, just watchalong with the rest of us. We're just saying.

• Ghosts Film Festival [Nine Inch Nails]

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I (2008)

Hello from Nine Inch Nails.

We're very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV. Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Now that we're no longer constrained by a record label, we've decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It's licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

We've also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album. If you'd like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf

Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Undoubtedly you'll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you're interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.

We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music. Thanks for listening.

http://ghosts.nin.com

Sigh:

I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted... it existed because it filled a void of what people want.

Amazon.com touted the fact that it had secured Radiohead for its new MP3 store, after the band had long refused to sell on Apple's iTunes. But how valuable will this relationship be if fans can essentially obtain Radiohead's music for free, with the band's blessing?

Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails, is on the warpath against his record label, Universal Music Group. In Sydney, Reznor kicked off the NIN concert with an appeal to the crowd to steal his music until the labels realize they're ripping people off. This follows his attack on the recording industry while playing the Beijing Pop Festival earlier this month. He asked Chinese fans who couldn't obtain legal copies of his album to download it off the Web. Reznor views labels as greedy entities — charging progressively more for records without passing any additional revenue to artists. Once the band's contract with Universal is finished, Reznor plans to sell music directly to his fans for about $4 an album.