I once saw Trent Reznor and David Byrne talk for about an hour about the future of music business, and the difficulty for artists to make any money these days. ‘With Spotify, why would you ever buy music again’ they were lamenting, ‘this generation isn’t interested by ownership anymore’. They had both agreed on the fact that a musician, an artist should now be an entrepreneur, a marketing person , and I remember Byrne saying ‘we used to think that musicians had to be high all the time, now they take care of their shit, it’s a big change of attitude!’
Trent Reznor is probably applying this idea at this minute, since, according to Billboard, he has revealed ‘he is working on a new secret project with Apple that could change the world of music streaming’… Again? How many times did I hear this?
Beats Music was bought by Apple earlier this year for about $3 billion, and Apple got interested in Reznor’s ideas as he was the chief creative officer of the Beats Music streaming service:
‘That’s flattering, as a life-long Apple consumer and fan and advocate,’ said Reznor ‘I am on the side of streaming music, and I think the right streaming service could solve everybody’s problems. Ownership is waning. Everybody is comfortable with the cloud — your documents, who knows where they are? They are there when you need them. That idea that I’ve got my records on the shelf doesn’t feel as important even to me as it used to. I just think we haven’t quite hit the right formula yet.’
He didn’t explain much more than that adding ‘I can’t go into details, but I feel like I’m in a unique position where I could be of benefit to them. That does mean some compromises in terms of how much brain power goes toward music and creating. This is very creative work that’s not directly making music, but it’s around music.’
Later in the conversation he confirms what everyone knows ‘paying for music is a relic of an era gone by’ feeling at the same time totally tortured about it as he is still ‘somebody who hopes you pay for music’. So we don’t know much more about this new project but Trent is excited: ‘It’s exciting to me, and I think it could have a big enough impact that it’s worth the effort. I’m fully in it right now, and it’s challenging, and it’s unfamiliar and it’s kind of everything I asked for – and the bad thing is it’s everything I asked for.’
Excited because he got paid a lot? He stays very mysterious, but I really wonder what system someone could come up with beside what already exists. Does it mean that Trent Reznor is in bed with Apple just like Bono? I guess, personally I thought Beats was just making fashionable and overpriced headphones.