THE NIN HOTLINE

Thudpaw, who likes pie, posted the following (more or less) in the NIN Spotting thread on ETS, where I often hunt for news these days, given the reluctance of people to submit news directly anymore.



Last month, he spotted an AIR flag in one of the port-a-johns over there.

So back sometime around the year 2000, a couple of guys in Lafayette, LA got the wise idea to download freely available bootlegs from the internet, burn them to CD, and sell these copies for profit at places like Mushroom Records near Tulane in NOLA. Back then, there wasn't the watchful eye of the crew of the echoing the sound marketplace, who are quick to shout down any fools trying to make a buck off bootlegging. Instead, Bill Pritchard and Dave Hubbel were the subjects of a federal investigation, and as of this week have been ordered to pay over $82,000 in fines to the RIAA.

'According to court records, the bootleg concerts ranged from the Stevie Ray Vaughn and Tori Amos to Korn, Matchbox 20 and Nine Inch Nails - or what [Judge] Doherty referred to as 'something about nails.' ... Doherty also ordered Pritchard to perform 350 hours of community service speaking to children about music bootlegging and piracy laws to 'let them know this is serious.'

The judge told Pritchard that in selling bootlegs he had taken money that might have otherwise gone to musicians and songwriters to pay doctor bills and send their kids to school.'

I'm all about coming down on the sale of bootlegs, particularly shoddy ones, but I wonder if the artists will actually see any of the money from this lawsuit. An additional thought: These guys sold bootlegs for over four years, and had a personal library of over a thousand bootlegs, and each of them has to pay about $45,000 to the RIAA. Compare this to a case wrapped up last October where the RIAA was awarded $222,000 from one woman for sharing 24 MP3s over Kazaa.

I promise I'll quit it with the current events updates when there's something more relevant to post about, which should happen in a handful of days, if the Feb 16th nin.com post holds true.

While we all wait for March 1 to go down and with it some subsequent revelation of something new at nin.com, I wanted to share a bit of humor in something our very own Cliff pointed out to me. So, apparently Maxim apologized to the Black Crowes for reviewing their new album without listening to it - apparently the reviewer heard one song, and gave the whole album two and a half stars, with a generic write-up. The funny bit here is how The Onion AV Club is for-shaming Maxim, when they've done practically the same thing. If you can convince me that The Good Soldier from Year Zero is 'a near-reprise of 1994's omnipresent MTV hit "Closer."', I might pretend that Aaron Burgess actually listened to the album that he slapped a B- on. (See, now we've covered both halves of my headline.)

I guess the real point here is that music critics like these guys are even less relevant in an era where you can typically find the music online before they get their promotional copy, with the chief difference between you and them being that you might actually listen to the music before forming an opinion, apparently.

If you were looking to buy Pearls to Pigs, Vol. 2, please be advised that the price is fucked up on Amazon, where it is (at the time of this posting) listed at $7.99, as opposed to the $4.95 v1 was priced at. They're working on rectifying this situation, but if you were planning to buy from Amazon, please be patient while things get smoothed out.

Pfft. Screw March. Let's start playing the NIN DLC next week! The folks at Harmonix have decided to throw us a curve ball and will be releasing the NIN pack for Rock Band next week. Xbox 360 owners get the pack on Tuesday while PS3 owners have to wait until Thursday. And yes, the pack will still contain the same songs that were announced earlier (March of the Pigs, The Collector & The Perfect Drug).

A number of people have reported that their accounts at The Spiral fan club have expired, and they are unable to renew them. This is no doubt a temporary glitch. If you're amongst the expired, we've got a thread at ETS collecting names, and you should post yours there too. Also, we got four news submissions about breast enlargement pills. I thought I'd share that with you. If you've ever submitted news, you know how ludicrous it is that something like that got through.

So, sometime last year, Vitamin Records approached me with news about a new compilation of String Quartet covers they had put out on CD, including a cover of Survivalism, asking if I would say something about it on the site. Well, the other bands that were covered on the CD included Good Charlotte, Bullet for my Valentine, Linkin Park, Sick Puppies, Cute is What We Aim For... and, yeah, I didn't really have it in me to pimp out a CD like that. While the Survivalism track is kinda neat, I can't honestly say that it's worth buying the whole CD just for that one track. Posting about it would just send everyone to torrent sites looking for it.

Well, I got a kind of follow-up email yesterday, letting me know that you can grab the track from Amazon.com as a DRM-free MP3 or via iTunes. That news I don't feel bad sharing with you, so check it out.

Join the 90+ people who have also not received a refund nor a tshirt on this Echoing the Sound thread (note: you have to register to view the forum this thread is in) as they compile the best course of action for dealing with a guy who bit off more than he can chew, and as a result has failed to deliver tshirt orders dating as far back as June of last year.

Not sure if it's worth throwing your name into the hat? Well, while he's been ignoring you and me, he's been working to secure an official license to take this to a bigger scale. I feel partially responsible for this meteoric rise, for in a lapse of reason, I posted his ads on my site. I let him handle the NIN Hotline tshirts I made last year, and the printer he went with screwed up the black shirts, and printed all the logos smaller than they appeared on the site. I personally approached Jason Lynes with solutions to make this order rectification process more transparent, and received, like many of you, empty promises.

Anyhow, I've put off making a post like this for too long. Folks in ETS have suggested filing with the Internet Crime Complaint Center and the (fairly toothless) Better Business Bureau. Set aside an hour or so and go through the thread to see what everyone else has done, and add your name to the list.

According to a brief headline at Nasty Little Man - a PR firm based in NYC - "We are proud to welcome NINE INCH NAILS to the nasty little man family. NIN news and full nasty webpage to follow shortly." From the looks of that, we're going to have more work on our hands in the coming months here at the Hotline. Thanks to Chowderhawk for pointing us to the news.

jerk99 wrote in with a link to a post on the ScoreHero message board where someone cracked into the .bin file from a recent Rock Band DLC pack, and unearthed a list of songs that Harmonix has worked on for Rock Band and may likely release as future expansions. A number of the songs have already been announced, including the NIN tracks March of the Pigs, The Collector, and The Perfect Drug. From the looks of this list, you'll also be able to rock out to the entire album Nevermind by Nirvana, and more classic tracks by the Who and the Rolling Stones.

Despite the fact that no one has ever requested them, I've added some exciting new Meathead Perspective wallpapers for those of you who hate your computers almost as much as you hate yourselves. There are even wallpapers to make your iPhone even more annoying! Holy shit! Okay bye.

**Very Inaccurate**

According to Pollstar, Nine Inch Nails will be performing on May 26, 2008 at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington.

Here is the lineup, **which is extremely similar, to the 2006 festival lineup, so this may be a pollstar mistake.** We'll wait and see.

**EDIT** Pollstar has recalled the earlier posted lineup, and NIN is nowhere to be seen. The Cure still remain. Sorry for the false alarm, and thanks to spursfor for the cross check on the dates.

By amazing bargain, I mean "bizarrely inflated price," as the first single from The Fragile is now listing for $39.99. This is not an import, it's not a discontinued item. Not as far as I can tell, anyway. I remember when this first came out, it was something like $1.99 in most stores, but somewhere in Philly they were selling them off for $0.25 a pop. Perhaps this is an effort to make back some of the losses on that particular promotion. Who knows.

Has this site run really, really slowly for you ever since the new layout launched? Would you prefer something other than white text on a black background? Is the text too big or too small for you? Well, yesterday I added a tiny feature that addresses everything but that last question. You may notice that next to the "submit news" link are a set of abbreviated theme options. While I will eventually move site options like this to somewhere more visually appealing, and perhaps easier to use, and maybe even build a login system so that your preferences are carried from system to system, for now, if you click on TF, you'll activate the Fragile theme (don't bother if you're still using Internet Explorer v6), clicking on LT activates the Lite version of the current theme, which eliminates transparency on everything but the site header. Clicking on YZ returns you to the default Year Zero based theme.

More theme options are coming soon, including a variation on the popular "black text on a white background" look, as well as em-based layouts that don't necessarily fill the screen, but zoom in and out uniformly. If that doesn't make any sense, don't worry about it.

If you try to switch themes and it doesn't work, you don't have cookies enabled in your browser. Or you are using a text-based browser, which doesn't really care about all that CSS crap I throw onto the page.