Saul Williams + Trent Reznor + Free = The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Tankboy

Fader is releasing the Trent Reznor / Saul Williams collaboration The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust! free of charge in DRM-free 192 kbps MP3 format. If you want a choice of formats, or you just want to directly support the artist, you can shell out $5. The album will be available for download November 1, but you can pre-order now.

In some ways this is awfully similar to the Radiohead model, with a few improvements. First of all, the higher baseline kpbs encoding is nice, but I really like the fact that if you pay, you can get the download in whatever format you’d like on up to FLAC.

Secondly, I don’t think this is physically coming out, so it won’t be viewed as a leveraging ploy / future CD-sales tactic. In fact it’ll probably give Williams more recognition than he’s (ever?) had. This is not just due to the sales model, since obviously Reznor’s involvement is pretty noteworthy … especially given his own recent outspoken disdain for the Major Label model of distributing music.

I’m liking these changing times.

About Tankboy

Tankboy resides in the body of Jim Kopeny and lives in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago with his girlfriend, Pickle the Kitten, Sasha the Cat, and a beagle named Betty who may actually be slightly more famous than most of the musicians slogging through the local scene. He's written about music for much longer than most bands you hear on the radio have even existed. He also swears that it wasn't him who did that and has learned that "deny everything" is a basic tenet of existence.
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One Response to Saul Williams + Trent Reznor + Free = The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!

  1. Alterhit* says:
    October 29, 2007 at 10:40 am

    I’m amazed that 700,000 people so far have bought the hard copy of in rainbows

    Reply