Nine Inch Nails has just released a new album entitled "Ghosts I-IV." An instrumental project, it has been released by Trent online, completely independent of any major record label.

Nine Inch Nails has just released new material online, independent of any record label. On the website you have several options for acquiring the new music. You can directly download high quality MP3, FLAC or Apple Lossless files for free of purchase:

0$ gets you Ghosts I - the first nine tracks of the album.

5$ allows you to download the entire album (36 tracks), along with many extras including: wallpapers, web promotional images and a 40-page PDF.

$10 will get you a 2-CD set in a six-panel digipak package and a 16-page booklet.

$75 gets you the deluxe edition package which comes with even more goodies.

$300 gets you the real deal: everything in the 75$ pack, plus 4 180-gram LP’s, two prints and other stuff - limited to 2,500 units and each is signed by Trent Reznor.

I opted for the $5 download myself. But the website is experiencing extremely high volume traffic, so it’s running slow and the file I downloaded became corrupted. I ended up downloading the album from a BitTorrent tracker, but later on I will try my 5$ download again, because I want the Apple Lossless files, and not MP3.

I think this is truly a breakthrough in the way the music industry will work: artists directly marketing their materials instead of working through major labels. Also, this is different from all previous NIN work because the entire thing is instrumental. At times it’s quite ambient, sometimes very heavy, very Mogwai or Godspeed-ish, but always uniquely NIN. They’ve also taken advantage of new tagging technology: instead of a single album image, every song has its own image associated with it, which you can view in your music player, or in the included PDF. I’m so impressed, I’m essentially speechless.

“What we thought could be a five song EP became much more. I invited some friends over to join in and we all enjoyed the process of collaborating on this.The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we’re able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed.”

Genius. Truly break-through. This is a new milestone in music.

Peace, I'm out.