Nine Inch Nails Ghosts I-IV

I was going to talk about this earlier this week, but after purchasing Nine Inch Nails Ghosts 1-IV I had trouble downloading it due to the huge demand. Getting the music from Amazon is not an option for me because the Amazon mp3 store is not yet available in Canada. Trent was good about the situation and reactivated the download links so today, after making sure the site was performing okay, I finally downloaded my copy in the flac format. I chose flac because it is an open and lossless format, though mp3 and apple lossless formats are also available.

I think Nine Inch Nails made the right choice with their distribution method, even though they were not prepared for the demand. If they ever do something like this in the future, which I obviously hope that they do, then let us hope that their server infrastructure is better prepared for the onslaught of rabid fans. For the record I consider myself one of those.

The most impressive aspect of this is that the albums are very experimental and consists of strictly music tracks. Note that I said albums. The I-IV refer to the fact that the music is broken into four volumes with each volume corresponding to a vinyl album. There was a limited run of actual albums created with all of them selling out the first day even though the cost of that set was a premium $300. That alone would have axed the project if it would have gone through a big music label. Even if the label allowed the concept album to go ahead, I suspect it would have not been properly supported.

Year Zero

I have been listening to the new Nine Inch Nails CD, which was released today. I find it interesting that I had no problem getting the CD on the day it was released, yet the extremely expensive software that I pre-ordered the day it was announced and has been out for two days already has not even been shipped yet. This has got me more angry than it probably should have, but why is it that so many companies in the computer industry seem to take customers for granted. If I was offering pre-orders for a product, I would go out of my way to make sure that my customers who were loyal enough to go to the effort of ordering a copy of the product before it was released got the product they ordered the day it was released (or at least a copy of it shipped to them on the release day).

One of the nice things that Nine Inch Nails did was to release the album online so that their fans could listen to it weeks before it came out. I actually did listen to it online, and while it would have been easy to steal the digital stream, I never because like the majority of people out there, I am honest. After listening to it once, and restraining myself from listening to it multiple times in an attempt to not spoil the higher quality CD version. It is just too bad that there wasn't a DRM free high quality version available on online music stores as I would have preferred to download it as I don't like having to running to a store to get stuff.

What the lack of a shipping copy of CS3 means is that the next episode of One of those Weeks will be created using Flash 8 instead of Flash CS3 like I want. It is probably not that big of a deal, but there are differences between ActionScript2 and ActionScript3, so it would be nice to finally only have to use ActionScript3. I just hope that Adobe gets their act together because the one thing I dread is having to switch to Silverlight even if it is suppose to be a cross-platform cross-browser Flash killer. Microsoft just doesn't have a very good track record when it comes to cross-platform compatibility. Though I must say that the name is much better than WPF/E.