Trent Reznor (NIN) gets it right

by Ezra

As everyone knows with the sheer volume of information being digitally produced on a yearly basis now, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a big issue. Music companies have been seemingly floundering on what to do about an ever increasing amount of piracy.

But in the face of all the old school flaccid record companies whipping themselves into a frenzy and trying to nail water to a wall by further alienating their audiences with DRM idiocies such as Sony’s root kit debacle, Trent Reznor seems like an artist who understands the power of the web as an information platform. The fact that there is a NineInchNails flickr account with official photography that is released under a Creative Commons license is case in point that Reznor is web savvy. The release of his new album Ghosts from his website and the structure of the packages available for download is nothing short of pure genius. The Ghosts website states that the album contains “Almost two hours of new music composed and recorded over an intense ten week period last fall”. Navigate through to the order page, and you’ll see that there are several options for obtaining a copy of this new album, and also that 2500 copies of the limited edition $300 package are sold out. So thats $750,000 up front which seems like a pretty reasonable start on album sales. But by structuring the packages with varying levels of benefit ie. - ” $75 Deluxe Edition: Ghosts I-IV in a hardcover fabric slipcase containing: 2 audio CDs, 1 data DVD with all 36 tracks in multi-track format, and a Blu-ray disc with Ghosts I-IV in high-definition 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow.” Reznor has included something for everyone. I downloaded the 9 free tracks, and I must say they are very good.

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I’m definitely going to pay the $5 and get all 36 tracks based on the “taster” above.

So how does this relate back to Information Architecture? It’s important to have a good understanding of web technology, and even more important to understand trends and where the web is going. Creative Commons is growing bigger, and will only get better. And as people who understand these things like Trent Reznor advocate Creative Commons in an innovative and exciting way, the bar will get raised across the board so that not only will consumers be delivered products that they want, and are excited by - but the artists will also get exactly what they deserve for their work.

Go - click on the image below and download it, it’s good:

Adding a Download Section for Wordpress

by Ezra

I’ve been running a lightly modified version of Higherground which has suited my purposes thus far. At some stage in the near future I’ll hopefully get enough time to sort out a fully customised theme. But until then, I’ve created a downloads page and periodically I plan to host anything that seems it might be useful for the future. Below is the process I went through to set it up:

  1. I searched for the type of plugin I would need and trialled a couple including drain hole.
  2. I decided on Download Monitor because it suited my purposes and was extremely user friendly.
  3. I downloaded and installed it via Fire FTP, and uploaded the InfoFoundry Higherground theme available for all.

Drain hole would be handy if you were using SVN, but as far as a simple app to manage downloading through the Wordpress admin panel - my pick would have to be Download Monitor.