Nine Inch Nails Launch YouTube Film Festival, Knock "In Rainbows"

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor launched a YouTube channel yesterday that will host a film festival of fan-made movies that feature tracks from Ghosts I-IV, insuring the fans' films will be reduced to compressed, blotchy, out-of-sync YouTube clips. Reznor himself will judge the competition, along with "special guests." Fans can upload their videos onto the YouTube page now, but Reznor insists you take your time, since the whole process is going to take a few months. And as the rules state, "Please don't just submit simple image slideshows."

In other Reznor news, he criticized Radiohead's pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows, calling it "insincere" and "a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale." "What they did right: they surprised the world with a new record, and it was available digitally first," Reznor said of his possible Lollapalooza co-headliners. "What they did wrong: by making it such a low quality thing, not even including artwork ... to me that feels insincere." Reznor's comments come one day after he revealed his self-released instrumental album Ghosts I-IV raked in $1.6 million in first week label-free sales.

Related Stories:
• Nine Inch Nails' "Ghosts I-IV" Makes Trent Reznor an Instant Millionaire
• Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails Expected to Headline Lollapalooza
• Nine Inch Nails Surprise Fans by Web-Releasing New "Ghosts" Album

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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