Trent Reznor on Apple Music: Other Services ‘Left Me Feeling Lacking’

Trent Reznor understands unhappiness. He’s sung about his personal feelings on Nine Inch Nails records and dealt with his dissatisfaction with the music business behind the scenes. After spending years on a major label for most of his career, he felt stifled. So he tried to market himself. He put out a coffee table book with his 2008 album Ghosts I – IV and explored other avenues of having a direct relationship with his fans. “I tried a bunch of different things that had varying degrees of success and failure, but all of them, in the end, felt like stunts to me,” he tells Rolling Stone. “So my own travels led me to think that subscription [streaming], if it was done right, really would be the best experience for music fans. But my experience with existing services left me feeling a little lacking.”

Now Reznor is taking his own stab at a streaming service, with an eye toward connecting with fans, with Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio. The singer previously served as the Chief Creative Officer of Beats Music, an extension of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s headphones company and, after Apple acquired that company last year, he stayed on to help design its new radio platform. Beats 1, which launches today, features shows by former BBC Radio host Zane Lowe and celebrities including Dr. Dre, Elton John and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, among others. It’s a way, he says, to make music discovery in the era of streaming more accessible.  

“I think having access to all the music in the world is great, but it then starts to place a burden on what the experience is like navigating through, now that you have access to everything,” Reznor explains. “I think that naturally places the burden on having an experience be great. I want that feeling of walking into an independent record shop, if there are still any that exist, like Amoeba [Records], and being delighted by the choices and the way music is presented to you with love and care. It’s exciting. And you leave with stuff you wouldn’t have dreamed you wanted and you’re excited to listen and share it and experience it.”

The Nine Inch Nails frontman says he tried to troubleshoot achieving that feeling with Iovine in Beats’ first incarnation, but realized he had an opportunity when working with Apple. Ultimately, he drew inspiration from listening to Lowe’s BBC show, in which the host would play and talk over records in an excited manner. “In today’s streaming, all-access world, sometimes it feels nice to know that there are other people out there and feel like you’re tuned into something that communally other people are listening to,” Reznor says. With Beats 1, he says he’s trying to approximate “when radio was good – which maybe it never was – but in my mind, there was a time when it seemed better than it currently is.”

For the singer, it’s all part of a larger quest, one he eagerly tells Rolling Stone about as he explains why Beats 1 is so significant to him. “Anything that makes music more important to people is worth it,” Reznor says. “Music is my entire life. It’s the only thing that I’ve been good at. I love it. I feel like it’s been my best friend. It’s something that has always given me focus, it’s always made me deal with anything, because I have this soundtrack. And I think that it’s something that’s become something that happens in the background rather than the foreground in the last 10 years or so. I’d like to nudge it a little closer to the foreground.”