The new Nine Inch Nails album is fantastic. It carries on the path from The Fragile to Lost Highway and Still, the path that was lost when Trent took 3 years off and then released With_Teeth. Trent's said that Ghosts wouldn't have been possible to release on a major label, which is easily believable. The songs aren't particularly catchy, (aside from 3 Ghosts I), and they take time to absorb. It's the kind of music I love, the kind that takes a while to take hold, and that rewards focused attention and repeated listening.

The release of the album, with a free section, and tiered pricing iterates on the low purchase rate of Niggy Tardust, which was released on the same model as In_Rainbows. I think Trent's experience with Saul Williams is not as instructive as it seems, since it seems the majority interested in hearing the album were NIN fans, not Saul's fans. A lot of my problem with the napster-bittorrent method of obtaining music is that it's easy to download the whole album to find out if you like it, but then difficult to convince yourself to go and pay for something you already "have". Niggy Tardust fell into the same trap, for people unfamiliar with saul's music.

The Ghosts experiment eases the issue by making a full quarter of the album readily available, and then adding value for higher pricing tiers. It's a lesson in Market Segmentation, so that people who just love the music can get in the door for $5 (or less for single tracks on amazon MP3), while people who have the money and appreciate physical discs and booklets can get more at a higher tier. It will be interesting to see how much better this album fares than Niggy Tardust did, although as slashdot points out the limited edition collector's box has already done well. The immediately foreseeable issue is that a) Not all albums have as easy a distinction to make between free sections and the whole album, and b) Most artists can't sell out a $300 box set in two days. The former might solve itself, though, if the experiment works to the level of influencing album releases, the way double sided LP's and cassettes once did.

7 Gravemakers and Gunslingers - Coheed and Cambria
Coheed finally has a woman singing for some of the characters, rather than Claudio singing falsetto. It actually makes them sound less twee, although that's also helped by their increasingly riff-based songs, and departure from the space-emo sound they started from. Both of the last two albums have started adding more and more instrumentation, high-gloss production, and anything else they can find, and I've yet to see them add more than their songwriting can absorb. Bigger and more epic just seems to suit them.

6 Type O Negative - Tripping a Blind Man
When Type O Negative was first popular, they really owned the goth metal aesthetic. By the time they got to "World Coming Down", they'd kind of jumped the shark as far as that atmosphere goes. It always had a limited appeal, and made several of my friends dismiss them outright. after a couple of "best of" releases, it seemed like they were done for. Their last two albums, though, have passed on the goth aesthetic, and gone straight for the self-deprecating humor, 3-act songwriting, and beatles-esque harmonies that have always made them great.

5 65daysofstatic - When We Were Younger & Better
These guys are a last.fm find, from my obsessive listening to dredg. There's a myth going around that the band formed to write a John Carpenter score, which is completely believable when you hear the band. All of their music follows violent storylines, at least in the fantasia world that I'm trapped in when I listen to it. The music is something like post-rock, something like industrial, and all instrumental. The soundscapes are all intensely memorable, which is a tribute to their songwriting. It took a while for this album to grow on me, since I just discovered them this year and was still obsessed with their last album.

4 Nine Inch Nails - Another Version of the Truth [Kronos Quartet]
Year Zero kinda slipped right past me. It's the first anything of his to do that since.... ever. Okay, since I started noticing him. The remix album, however, coincided with the launch of remix.nin.com, and my being reminded what a cool guy trent is. I picked up the remix album, and was immediately made happy by the daft-punk-gone-aggro "Meet Your Master" filtered through The Faint. The 14 minute "Me I'm Not" is also brilliant. This track, though, delivers on the hint of an idea from "Things Falling Apart"'s "The Frail" - the creepy string section that pushes a simple song into a mind-bending otherworldly soundtrack of doom.

3 Battles - Tonto (Four Tet remix)
I love Four Tet remixes. But I also really like Mirrored. I was completely non-plussed by their live performance at Pitchfork. I can't really explain what made me download the album after that experience. Nonetheless, I'm glad I did. The album is fantastic, and great for working to. Their music can border on the bland, in large doses, which I think is what happened at P4M Festival. Four Tet is great and teasing out the dark undercurrents in tracks they remix, which is what they've done to tonto (this track is from the tonto+ EP).

2 Burial - Archangel
Confession: I didn't even hear about Burial's debut album. Southern Comfort is by far my favorite song of his, but Untrue is the album that was released this year. The first single is more indicative of the brilliance of his self-titled debut, than the airy aesthetic of the rest of this years album. The songs ebb and flow in the way that great electronic music should, following from Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, and Roni Size. The wifest is weirded out by the traces of garage that linger in it, but I love the cool bits of actual dance music that hang in the shadows of what's essentially ambient music. The melodies in the foreground come and go, in the loose progressive style that I love dance music for.

1 Nahemah - Labyrinthine straight ways
The second Philosophy is an absolutely amazing album. I was only prevented from listening to it more by its absolutely devastating sadness. There were days I would sit down to work on something, put the album on, and be completely immobilized by the album. I haven't been this emotionally affected by an album since Cursive's Ugly Organ. The recommendation for this album came from invisibleoranges, and was the jumping off point for me being completely obsessed with everything he recommends. The keyboards on the album are the rare example of metal not being weakened by twee 80's sounds dumped in for filler. This is more like Opeth's "Baying of the Hounds", in that it draws from Moog-ish sounds that actually belong in a hard rock aesthetic.

Rock should be less like a mall and more like a yard sale.

There's been a lot of pontificating about the new Radiohead album, and how it's hastening the demise of the recording industry. Largely because of Nine Inch Nails's announcement a few days later, and other bands jumping on the bandwagon immediately afterward. It's cool, that's for sure. The more the merrier. But the concept of setting your own price is something Jonah Matranga has been doing since onlinedrawing's jonahpster, and that you can still do in his current shop1. Radiohead's success still depended, for a long time, on the music industry.

The death knell for the industry was 2005's CYHSY, who rose to sudden popularity based on a solid review from Said the Gramaphone, and sold hundreds of thousands of self-printed CD's without any assistance from a major label's marketing budget. Hailed as the next Arcade Fire, not so much because of their sound, but because of their lightening fast rise to popularity without wasting a lot of money.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy Radiohead (I Might Be Wrong is one of my favorite live albums), but their primary skill is following the right trends. Their fans are often oblivious to the aphex twin influences, or the truly independent bands that have paved their way.

Smart new artists aren't wasting their time trying to get noticed by labels. They know that the scene is moving. They're building myspace friends and selling shows in towns they've never been to. I get albums emailed from artists like Nato Caliph just because I have a blog. Nato is doing more to hasten the death of the RIAA by sidestepping the entire system, than Radiohead's little temper tantrum and to-be-released box set capitulation2 .

1. base price ± what you feel it's worth
2. Radiohead has announced that they plan on signing a deal with a record label to release in_rainbows in physical form. It doesn't get much press because it doesn't sound quite so defiant.