Woah, that’s a big logo…did it get your attention?
Trent Reznor, singer and only “real” member of the band Nine Inch Nails, has been one of the pioneers on the forefront of changing the way the music industry operates. He’s gained worldwide media attention for stunts including telling a live audience at one of his shows to steal his album because he felt fans were being ripped off by the current price.
Reznor has also gotten recognition for the unique way he released Saul Williams’ record Niggy Tardust, by offering fans the choice of either downloading the album for free, or paying five dollars to support the artist. He then went on to offer his album Ghosts I-IV online, with the ability to download a preview torrent for free, containing the first nine songs of the album. The entire album was also placed under a creative commons license, actually allowing people to do what they want with the music on the record, as long as they give the band credit. To top it off, his very latest album, The Slip, was put up for completely free download as a reward for all the fans over the years.
The latest venture of Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor is a little different; the story goes that apparently before a gig, Trent brought out his iPhone while backstage and looked at Twinkle (a location based Twitter program) and saw people were already messaging and posting pictures while waiting to get in. So he did what anyone in this situation would do; he started posting pictures from backstage on Twinkle too.
So started the idea for nin:access; an iPhone exclusive application (for now) which serves as a tool which integrates the same location based chatting used by Twinkle and other such iPhone apps, with the majority of features that appear on the band’s official website.
Starting up the app, you are introduced to the front page, complete with photo blog and news feeds. From there you can navigate to the website’s media library, the chat, profile messages and the forums. While access to everything is essentially open, to communicate with other fans a profile on the website is required, which can be both created and signed into via a little icon in the top corner of the screen.
While having access to band news and the forum in your pocket is awesome enough for any fan (including myself), my favourite feature by far is the media library, which is home to various band videos, streaming music, photos, and even exclusive iPhone wallpapers, featuring images which stretch across the bands catalogue.
nin:access is the ultimate application for a fan like me. I only have two real problems, the first being that it took almost two weeks after the program going live, before I was able to use it, because it kept crashing on the start up screen (apparently had something to do with time zones, I don’t know). The other is that while I can stream remix galore from the default playlists at NIN Remix, none of the playlists of “official” songs would work when selected, and instead bomb out to the main screen of the iPhone.
The only feature I’m disappointed that wasn’t added was the ability to listen to the custom playlists of the remixes created while on the remix website. I guess I’ll have to wait and hope an update comes out that rectifies this. Even if it doesn’t, I’m still content with what is on offer, as I am sure any fan will be.
