Trent Reznor Dismisses DIY, Ridicules Musicians Shaking Their Cups For Scraps

Trent Reznor Dismisses DIY, Ridicules Musicians Shaking Their Cups For Scraps

In a fairly revealing interview with Spin, Trent Reznor reminds us of why it's often dangerous to turn musicians into ideological symbols. Reznor has had a strong association with DIY music but recently chose to take his work to Columbia Records. In opening up about his choices he ridicules current DIY approaches and reminds us that he's on a serious fantasy trip about Beats Music.

It's interesting to read this post by Trent Reznor from 2009 on getting known in music when you're an unknown. You can tell he's totally immersed in web-enabled DIY business for musicians. It's not just an opinion piece.

He also raised questions about social media that revealed how hands on he was:

"The reason no record label knows how to market anything to new media is they don't live there. They don't get it because they don't use it. What you've seen happen with the marketing and presentation of NIN over the last years is a direct result of living next to you, listening to you, consuming with you and interacting with you. Directly."

"There's no handlers or PR people here, it's me and my guys - that's it. There's no real plan, even - it's just trying to do the right thing that respects you the fan, the music, and me the artist. That's the goal - a mutual and shared respect."

Trent Reznor's Journey Back From DIY

Since then Trent Reznor has chilled on his absolutist stance regarding record labels and seemed to be going in a direction that recognized that different artists need different options depending on what they're trying to accomplish.

Yet he also seemed to be losing a bit of his technical edge as he bought into what still seems like Beats Music Kool-Aid, that Beats Music was taking a radical step forward by including human curation.

In his feature interview with SPIN, Reznor briefly references his views about Beats Music:

"I'm working on something with Beats that's a marriage of humanity and technology, which is sort of what my music has always been about."

I still think that's the Kool-Aid talking but it's important to feel good about what one is doing.

Is Reznor's Real Problem His Rigid All-or-Nothing Stance?

Reznor definitely feels good about working with Columbia Records but when he discusses the difference I start to get the feeling that he took DIY to an extreme:

"Being in control of your own destiny was great...It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible."

I don't want to read too much into a situation with which I'm unfamiliar based on a few random comments but there are so many quality indie firms ready to help musicians with any aspect of what needs doing that I have to wonder if he got lost in DIY as Do-It-All-Yourself. It's as if he believes that one either does everything oneself or has to make some sort of record deal.

The Reznor Binary: Or Go Fuck Yourself

Taking an all-or-nothing stance actually fits Reznor's public presentation over time. From his early aesthetic to his later statements about DIY to his rude dismissal of DIY successes in the SPIN interview:

"I know that what we're doing flies in the face of the Kickstarter Amanda-Palmer-Start-a-Revolution thing, which is fine for her, but I'm not super-comfortable with the idea of Ziggy Stardust shaking his cup for scraps. I'm not saying offering things for free or pay-what-you-can is wrong. I'm saying my personal feeling is that my album's not a dime. It's not a buck. I made it as well as I could, and it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself."

The line "it costs 10 bucks, or go fuck yourself" has found some resonance on Twitter with its punk veneer and whatever else is going on there for respondents.

But the about face in perspective, one that at first did not appear so extreme, now looks at documented successes and makes fun of them. Sure, he dismissively says it's okay for other people, but his message that "my way is the best way or fuck you" is quite clear.

I guess that's just what passes for punk rock these days.

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Either Trent Reznor Is Clueless About Streaming Or Beats By Dre Is Taking A Radical Leap Forward

The short version of the story is that Trent Reznor is very excited about this project and feels it's bringing something new into the world. But Reznor's comments also appear to lead to Wes Davenport's conclusion:

The Handful of Sentences That Everyone's Discussing

Alex Wilkinson interviewed Trent Reznor for The New Yorker and the interview itself is currently paywalled. Pitchfork appears to be the most prominent source of Trent Reznor's comments about a new streaming music service from Beats by Dre, currently referred to as "Daisy", that:
"uses mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener... [but also] would present choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs, making it a platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately."
"That first wave of music presentation which felt magical, the one where the songs are chosen by algorithms that know who you listened to... has begun to feel synthetic."
Reznor describes how it would be different from Spotify:
"'Here's sixteen million licensed pieces of music,’ they’ve said, but you’re not stumbling into anything. What's missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation."
That layer of "intelligent curation" will be:
"like having your own guy when you go into the record store, who knows what you like but can also point you down some paths you wouldn't necessarily have encountered."
An article in Rolling Stone adds the additional line:
"As great as it is to have all this information bombarding you, there's a real value in trusted filters."
We're Talking About Curation and Discovery

This focus was pointed out in October at a Beats press conference that included the news that Trent Reznor was working with Beats though it was unclear on what he was actually working:
"The company has 'very big plans,' Wood said, for Mog, the streaming service it purchased earlier this year, hinting that it relates to how people consume and discover music...Iovine picked up the thread, saying that most streaming services require consumers to program their music experience themselves -- and he said consumers can't be expected to do that, which would seem to suggest a greater emphasis on music discovery and recommendations, possibly including a radio function."
In addition, an unidentified "source who was not authorized to speak on behalf of Beats told Billboard.biz" that:
"For now, Beats is spending very little to recruit new customers for Mog -- that's because the company plans to eliminate the Mog brand, and competition will heat up in 2013. Beats is planning to roll out an entirely re-branded service that will be tightly integrated with its high-end audio gear sometime next year."
Does Trent Reznor Know What He's Talking About?

Music discovery is a huge topic to the point that we're all getting sick of the term. Human curated discovery on the web includes music bloggers and sites that leverage that curation such as Hype Machine.
MOG itself used human curation in such forms as artist-curated playlists and editorial picks of new albums. And Pandora is built on The Music Genome Project which relies on human analysis of music.
Given that Reznor referenced Spotify, the service most noted for weak discovery elements, it raises two possibilities:
Reznor isn't really familiar with the landscape of music streaming services; or,
What Reznor's involved with developing at Beats is really something new and special and it's not his job to pitch it accurately, at least at this stage.
If we assume the worst, then Reznor has gotten sucked into the hubris and bullshit that leads people like Jimmy Iovine to state:
"I'm proud that Beats was able to turn an entire generation onto sound...we are the beginning of fixing sound for an entire generation that was lost to it."
But Reznor seems genuinely taken with the work they're doing. In another interview with Ned Raggett for The Quietus that came out yesterday, Reznor stated:
"the thing with [Dr.] Dre will reveal itself pretty soon, it's not a physical product, it's a platform...it was a real challenge to come up with that. Will it work? It may, it may not. But it's something that's a puzzle for me to solve, in and of itself challenging, and it's utilising some skills I have in an unfamiliar and unsafe half of my safety zone kind of way, and it's been interesting."
What Will the New Service Look Like?

I'm not yet willing to accept that Trent Reznor has become a know-nothing corporate hack. Given that assumption, here's what we might expect from Beats by Dre's music streaming service:
Daisy will appear in 2013 as a music streaming service that is tightly integrated with Beats' headphones and related offerings.
Daisy will be called something else since it's probably a developer's term for the current build of the service and has nothing to do with the actual naming process of the final product.
Daisy will be a rebuild of the software foundations of MOG that includes a much more creative approach to discovery than we've seen to date.
Daisy will offer a higher quality of streaming music in keeping with the brand direction of Beats by Dre and Reznor's own history of offering high quality downloads.
Daisy will be marketed with a celebrity angle and the celebs will provide some of the "intelligent curation."
That's what I think. What do you think?

Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/App.net) blogs about music crowdfunding at Crowdfunding For Musicians (@CrowdfundingM). To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.

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What Can We Expect From The Project Daisy Music Service?

What Can We Expect From The Project Daisy Music Service?

By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

It’s July 1, which means we’re into the second half of 2013. As such, this seems like a good time to ask: Where are the big new celebrity-driven music services that were supposed to up-end the status quo and make everybody care about music in new ways? These would be Project “Daisy,” initially created by Beats Electronics (Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre) and now including Trent Reznor and Ian Rogers; and Pono, from Neil Young, with approval from Beck and other high-profile friends.

Let’s preview “Daisy” first.
Project ‘Daisy’

This as-yet-unnamed music subscription service hopes to unite expert tastemaking and a music subscription to bring back the “cultural context” and “emotional connection” to music, which its executives say is missing.

The Players

Founders: Beats Electronics’ Jimmy Iovine (longtime record industry guy, American Idol Judge, co-founder of Interscope and Beats Electronics) and Andre Young a.k.a. Dr. Dre (co-founder of Beats Electronics, rapper, producer, former co-owner of Death Row Records).
CEO: Ian Rogers, formerly of The Beastie Boys crew, Yahoo Music, TopSpin
Creative Chief: Trent Reznor, frontman of Nine Inch Nails and digital music innovator
Title unknown: Beats Electronics president and COO Luke Wood
Judging from the announcement of Daisy’s spinoff from Beats, Dre won’t have much to do with Daisy going forward; Iovine and Beats’ president and COO Luke Wood will help Rogers and Reznor launch Daisy by the end of the year.
Why It’s “Different”

At its technology core, Daisy will be based on MOG, which Beats acquired for $14 million before spinning Daisy off as its own company on the strength of $60 million in new investment.

However, its creators promise a vastly different experience.

Experts will curate music for listeners, although how they’ll do that isn’t clear. Once listeners find an artist they like, Daisy will reportedly help that artist sell stuff directly to those fans, ostensibly using Rogers’ chops as the former CEO of TopSpin, which specializes in direct-to-fan marketing and sales. Overall, Iovine says, the goal is to do for music discovery and consumption what Beats did for the sound quality of mainstream headphones.

A Daisy spokesperson declined to comment or connect us for an interview, but said they’ll keep us in the loop as things progress. However, we have uncovered one piece of new information: “Daisy,” the codename of the project, does not come from the first computer to sing. It’s actually the name of Luke Wood’s dog.

Challenges

Rhapsody and others have had editorial around music forever. Rdio has a great “follow” feature, and now Spotify does too. Meanwhile, 8tracks, Songza and many others already have curated playlists. And while it could be easy to get a few celebs and music critics to program playlists around the launch, it’s hard to know whether they’ll stick around — or whether Daisy will be able to take the concept past the celebrity playlist and radio programming that already exists, to create something new and exciting to the mainstream on the level of Beats By Dre headphones.

The idea of reinventing the music subscription in a way that people who never considered subscribing before would do it sounds great in theory — and yes, this is exactly what Beats did for headphones. However, it could be quite difficult in practice. Mainstream consumers have used plenty of headphones before, but most have yet to pay for unlimited music.

Longshot

In March, before Apple announced iTunes Radio (details), eWeek noted the curious timing of a meeting between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Beats Electronics CEO Jimmy Iovine — just before Beats announced it was spinning off Daisy as a separate company. This caused eWeek to conclude that “Apple’s music streaming service may be Daisy.”

Of course, we now know that Apple is prepping its own iTunes Radio service for the fall, which unlike Daisy, is an internet radio service. Daisy, on the other hand, is an unlimited, on-demand music subscription (like Rdio, Rhapsody, or Spotify), so Apple could theoretically still buy Daisy to round out its stable of music offerings, although we wouldn’t count on it. Maybe Apple will wait to see how Daisy does first (or maybe Apple said no to an acquisition, so Beats spun Daisy out on its own instead).

Status

In announcing its spinoff of Daisy, Beats Electronics stated that Daisy will launch towards the end of 2013. Its name is probably not final (daisy.com and daisymusic.com are taken, and daisy.fm appears unregistered).

Pono

We’re going to look at Pono soon; stay tuned.

(Image courtesy of USC)

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• Either Trent Reznor Is Clueless About Streaming Or Beats By Dre Is Taking A Radical Leap Forward (hypebot.com)
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