Saul Williams is the next hero in the destruction of the Music Industry as we know it. A US hip hop artist with a pretty kick ass sound. He’s distributing his album using a similar method to Radiohead, however you can only either pay $5 or nothing, which is rather cool. The other advantage they have available is the faster that there’s 3 versions to choose from. 192KBps MP3, 320Kbps MP3, or Lossless FLAC for the audiophiles. I bought the album to support the cause, after I listened to a few of his tracks I found on youtube that is. The album is pretty cool, it’s produced by Trent Reznor of NIN and you can hear some of that coming though, not enough to annoy you though. Definitely worth the buy I reckon. The text on the More Info page of the Niggy Tardust website is great, I love it:

My Dearest Friends and Fans,

It is my greatest honor to present to you The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!,
my new album produced by Trent Reznor and mixed by Alan Moulder. The wall of sound that we’ve created is tagged with such graffiti that a passerby would seek out doors and ways to ENTER. Once inside a world defined by dreams come true they’d find aligned with the simplest act of sharing what we treasure. Most people aren’t aware of the world of art and commerce where exploitation strips each artist down to nigger. Each label, like apartheid, multiplies us by our divide and whips us ’til we conform to lesser figures. What falls between the cracks is a pile of records stacked to the heights of talents hidden from the sun. Yet the energy they put into popularizing smut makes a star of a shiny polished gun. The ballot or the bullet for Mohawk or the mullet is a choice between new times and dying days. And the only way to choose is to jump ship from old truths and trust dolphins as we swim through changing ways. The ways of middlemen proves to be just a passing trend. We need no priests to talk to God. No phone to call her. And when you click the link below, i think it fair that you should know that your purchase will make middlemen much poorer…

NiggyTardust!

love,

Saul

Possibly the greatest music / rare oddities site is gone, not a good thing.

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There’s so much stuff going on with the intarweb at this very moment. I just got an email telling me I could download Radiohead’s new album In Rainbows, which I preordered earlier. The new episode of Martin Sargent’s Web Drifter has been released, and in less than an hour, Half Life 2 : Episode 2 and Portal are released. It’s craziness.

So I preordered my copy of Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, as you may have noticed in the previous post the digital download of the album had no set price, you simply paid what you wanted for the album, if you wanted to you could put in £0, and I’m sure some did, I decided to pay roughly the same amount I would pay on the iTunes store, £7:50, now that I think of it actually it’s probably a buck or two more than an iTunes album, ahh well. The point is, and this is a big point, that record companies simply don’t seem to get, even though it’s common knowledge, if people are going to pirate an album they are simply going to do it, myself included, I’ve bought the odd album off iTunes, mainly EMI stuff because it’s available DRM free, and that’s a big step for a large record company. But what Radiohead is doing is making a good point and I like that, which is why I will spend my hard earned on the album. and when Trent Reznor and NIN do similar things to their next album, I’ll support that too.

Pay nothing if you like. Interesting experiment…

I love it.

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