Love him or loathe him, Trent Reznor is a genius. Nine Inch Nails has been around for years now, and although too dark and ‘industrial’ for some, his work has always been original and exciting. However, his vision extends well beyond pure music and includes the wider digital realm.
NIN’s Year Zero 2007 concept acted as a beacon of hope for a music industry desperately attempting to keep alive a terminally ill business model. Year Zero was a total multi-media experiential project, incorporating an ARG, live events, merchandise and social media – however, the actual CD was a key artifact, a central piece of the expanding phenomenon that was Year Zero.
It was also acknowledged as one of the great marketing campaigns, picking up a Cyber Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Advertising Festival – I had the privilege of judging the campaign at that event.
Since then NIN have experimented with different distribution models, allowing fans to download the album The Slip from the NIN Nails website (free of charge), and an EP to coincide with their current tour.
Trent Reznor’s status as a digital pioneer is already well known and well documented, so why am I writing this post?
Well, I’m a big fan and long-time reader of Mojo, the Music Magazine, as it has well written news, interviews, and reviews – and in the July 09 issue there was brilliant interview with Trent Reznor. The article provided some real insights to an older and wiser Mr Reznor. I was so impressed by the piece that I wanted to ‘tweet’ about it and provide a link to the interview on the Mojo website……..
There was just one small problem – there was no sign of the interview on the Mojo site – there are other interviews on the site, but ironically, of all the musicians Mojo interview, they didn’t choose to upload their interview with one of the music industry’s internet gurus!
To add insult to injury, I emailed Mojo and asked whether they intended uploading the piece to their site so I could link to it. This was their reply:
Out of Office AutoReply: Trent Reznor interview – are you going to put it online?
Hello,
Thank you for your email.
Please note that you have come through to MOJO editorial. The team will only deal with queries specific to the editorial content of the magazine, including competition entries, letters and complaints.
However, if you have an enquiry relating to subscriptions you can call 01858 438 806 and they will do their best to answer your question. Advertising queries should be made to the ads team by calling 020 7295 5000.
Thanks for your support,
MOJO
An auto-response – Gosh, I feel special, thanks Mojo, very ‘social media’ of you!
Following on from my last post, here’s a look at what the 1999 kitchen of the future was going to look like from a 1967 perspective. Again, I have no idea where this clip came from but if anyone can tell me, I’d be grateful – IBM, Honeywell, some science show or something completely different?
I have no idea where this clip originally came from but it’s an interesting look at what we thought 1999 was going to look like. This clip shows how we were all going to be doing ‘fingertip shopping’ from the home.
While some of the thinking was spot on – e-commerce and shopping sites; what’s really funny looking at this clip from 1967 is the chauvinistic view of the world and women’s role in it, and how the guy pays and reviews his bills for payment!
Anyway, enjoy and if anyone can tell me where this clip came from, I’d be grateful – IBM, Honeywell, some science show or something completely different?
A few months old now, but Seth Godin‘s terrific video presentation from Ted Talks explains how the power of tribes and the Internet change everything we know about advertising, media and “one to many” communications.
The Genie is out of the bottle and it’s too late to try and put it back again.
It’s taken a while, but it looks like Twitter is now a bona fide, mainstream phenomenon, because this month, Time Magazine’s cover story is all about Twitter.
Well done to Twitter, and let’s hope this isn’t a sign that the Twubble is about to burst as early adopters ‘jump ship’ to look for the next cool, edgy, big thing. Probably not this time, because recent research shows that Twitter has (with the exception of ‘Celeb Followers’), got where it is without a lot of support from either Gen Y or the Millenials, probably the most fickle of all groups. No, Twitter has become the SM tool of choice of Gen X and Boomers.
It has become invaluable to users as an ‘interest and link resource’ – once you’ve found key people to follow ( based upon your own interests), you can post and read tweets, and send interesting links to each other and the group. In effect, these fellow Tweeps become part of your ‘global hive research brain’. The power of global micro-bloggers in real time!
The 1980′s, a decade of indulgence, bad fashion, big hair, and even bigger shoulder pads.
And it wasn’t just the hair and shoulder pads that were huge. Big egos, big aspirations and a huge hunger for success all combined to make the 80′s the decade of greed. Who can forget the immortal line, “Greed is good”, as used by Gordon Gecko, the stockbroker anti-hero in the movie Wall Street?
In the early 80′s, mobile phones were relatively new, and the size of house bricks. IBM launched the home PC in 1981 and most of us were using MS-DOS until the arrival of Windows in 1985. Mass browsing on the World Wide Web would take another 9 years, when the Mosaic browser was launched.
What’s truly amazing is that many of us remember the 80′s but cannot recall how technology has moved along since then.
So, what has changed in the last 3 decades? Thankfully, the physical dimensions of most things personal – hair, shoulder pads, mobile phones, computers have all reduced dramatically. “Greed is good”, the ethos of the 80′s, isn’t a popular stance in our current times. Conspicuous consumerism is no longer cool and vulgar displays of wealth are tacky. Thrift is the new black, and although size is everything, now it’s all about down-sizing – cars, homes, jewelery, weddings, mobile devices, laptops and stereo systems are just a few examples. Now, ‘Small is good’, just as long as it performs exceptionally well.
However, before we merely write the 80′s off as the ‘bad taste’ decade, remember that it was also the time of the emergence of consumer based mobile and personal computing technologies, the predecessors of our i-phones, Blackberries and always-on home media centres.
This has been out for a couple of months now, but it’s just so cool I wanted to put it up on my blog.This is not science fiction, it’s reality and Sixth Sense is one of the projects from MIT Media Lab.
Video of presentation comes courtesy of TED and forms part of their ongoing series of TEDTalks – watch and be amazed, but I don’t think they’re taking orders yet!
Described as a way of “generating word clouds from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text”.
There are three ways of doing it – you can paste in your own words or a passage from a book; or enter the url of any blog that has an Atom or RSS feed; or finally, enter the del.icio.us user name of anyone and see their tags as clouds.
I ‘created’ the example above by merely pasting in the url of this blog and hitting ‘Submit’. You can choose from a variety of fonts, layouts and colour palettes. Very cool and very addictive!
On top of the usual online places I use for pics and other low level documents, I needed access to a relatively secure storage option online. Something that would allow me to upload various files, including video clips, and that I can retrieve as and when I need them from wherever I may be. It would also be useful to be able to allow access to certain designated files, via a password system for other people. It also needed too be simple and as easy as saving / retrieving files on my own computer, while still being available from other PC’s. I did a bit of online research and explored a few options before settling on Dropbox.
This is ideal for my needs, as it ticks all my requirements for simplicity, flexibility and mobility, and provides a decent level of security as all data is transferred over SSL and encrypted with AES-256 before storage.
Year Zero was a total multi-media experiential project, incorporating an ARG, live events, merchandise and social media – however, the actual CD was a key artifact, a central piece of the expanding phenomenon that was Year Zero.
Trent Reznor’s status as a digital pioneer is already well known and well documented, so why am I writing this post?
It’s taken a while, but it looks like Twitter is now a bona fide, mainstream phenomenon, because this month, Time Magazine’s cover story is all about Twitter.
And it wasn’t just the hair and shoulder pads that were huge. Big egos, big aspirations and a huge hunger for success all combined to make the 80′s the decade of greed. Who can forget the immortal line, “Greed is good”, as used by Gordon Gecko, the stockbroker anti-hero in the movie 
