THE NIN HOTLINE

Even though it's common knowledge that engaging people online is a great way to expose people to music, it's still very rare that bands or promoters get in touch with fan sites. So kudos to The Horrors for reaching out and sending along an MP3 of the first single off their Primary Colours album, called Sea Within a Sea. That link you just read past? No sign-up form or anything, just a direct link to an eight minute long MP3.

Okay, they also sent us a link to a couple of videos - the previously mentioned Sea Within a Sea, as well as Who Can Say. I had actually first heard about the Horrors myself when I learned that one of my favorite directors, Chris Cunningham had come out of hiding to direct their video for Sheena is a Parasite, so it was a pleasant surprise to hear that they were playing three of the four NIN shows in New York in late August.

Their new album, Primary Colours, was produced by Geoff Barrow (of Portishead) and Chris Cunningham and came out in May to some pretty great reviews. Reviews, however, are kind of dumb when you can just listen to the album yourself - oh, look at that, there's a widget right next to me and I didn't even notice.

But what happens if you don't have Flash? What if the only way you can listen to music is using a turntable? Fret not, luddite audiophile, we've got a contest aimed squarely at you. We will simultaneously try to accommodate your dated technology, while forcing 'new' tech on you. Yeah, you know what's coming next.

No, you don't have to follow us on Twitter, but you do have to have an account and send us a somewhat specific tweet. Tell us what make and model turntable you have, and use the ego-stroking hashtag #fanjob. For example: "@ninhotline I use a Technics 1200s to make the wikky-wikky noise #fanjob" - (note: using that exact text for your entry exempts you from the contest, unless you're @Therum)

I don't care how many turntables you have - pick your favorite one, because I only want you to tweet once. If you squeeze in a photo of your turntable setup, I'll count your entry twice in the final drawing.

Wait, what's this for anyway? We're giving away five signed copies of the Horrors album Primary Colours on vinyl. How long is the contest open? Well, Twitter's a fast moving medium, so we'll keep it open until Friday night at midnight Eastern time. Five winners will be drawn randomly from the resulting mess of tweets. The contest is international - because that's how we like to do contests here, and because the Horrors have cool people working for them.

I think that I've typed enough on the topic now. Hopefully it's enough text to wrap around the widget on your screen resolution - it's wrapping around it on the preview under where I'm typing, so that's my cue to hit "Publish."

Lydia63 took the time to post scans and a transcription over at this thread on Echoing the Sound, where you can partake in the discussion that ensued. Our backup copy of said article is #500 in our article archive! Okay, there are only 462 active articles in that archive - some were dupes, some were mistakes, and early on there were some awesome security gaps that allowed someone in China to expound on something or another.

Still, not too shabby. Remember, you can search them all, broken down by date and by category. Maybe someday I'll incorporate the old article archive (courtesy Keith Duemling's now defunct smashedupsanity.com) into a database driven format. That one's got 600 articles. Enjoy!

54%-34%, last I looked. I think you know what needs to be done. Here's where to do it. No, it's not 1999. Yes, it is 2009.

It appears as though Ticketmaster is getting into the spirit of things by offering their own presale for NIN tickets this Friday (tomorrow) to the four shows that didn't have their full allotment available during last Friday's nin.com presale. The four shows available are - Click this link for more info. The general onsale for these four shows is still scheduled for next Friday, July 31st. Also, it appears that this is going to act as confirmation that all four LA shows were nin.com exclusives and are, in fact, sold out. Of course, if we hear anything to the contrary, we'll let you all know.

I had this big scarcastic paragraph written out about this interview, but then Firefox crashed and didn't save what I wrote. In brief, save yourself £2.20 and read these scans of the new Kerrang! magazine feature that Cherry Black (who selflessly caught the bullet for the whole community here) kindly uploaded.

They have a long way to go, but Ticketmaster is taking a step in the right direction with their paperless ticket stipulation for the rest of the NIN club concerts.To say that this is fantastic news is an understatement. For more info, head here and click on question #9 to get all of the details on paperless tickets.

Remember: Buying tickets from a ticket reseller for this tour will get you NOTHING unless they are actually attending the same concert as you are. Also, and this is important: Do not support the scumbag asshole movement by paying more than face value for a ticket to be someone's guest.

Speaking of scalpers, one of our readers who goes by the handle Midnight did some investigative research, and discovered some info on that guy selling two Bowery tickets for $5,000 on eBay. To quote, "Seems that he and his younger brother were arrested four years ago for burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, fencing and conspiracy to commit theft and burglary." Ouch. NIN Community 1, Scalper 0.

So the pre-sale adventure has subsided, and everyone's gotten their bursts of joy or sorrow out of their system by now, and that means it's time for resellers to crawl out of their holes. The presale system set up through MusicToday appears to be very effective at limiting scalping - you see, you need photo ID to pick up your tickets, and as soon as you get your tickets, you're escorted inside the venue. Which makes it HIGHLY unlikely that the tickets this sewage sludge is selling for $4,000 exist.

Asking $1500 for a ticket you paid $65 for is no less of a dick move. This auction item, however, is awesome.

If you are looking for a ticket to one of the shows, seek out others in the community. Echoing the Sound has had a ticket swapping thread that dates back to 2005. There's a thread on nin.com about reporting scalpers to Craigslist and eBay. Don't give your money to scalpers. Find someone who'll take you as their +1 for a reasonable price.

The short version: Shows at the smaller venues, with tickets are being sold exclusively through nin.com, are $65 per ticket. All other tickets are $55 + service fees. There is a limit of two tickets per person, per show.

To check this out yourself, go to tour.nin.com, log in, scroll down to the show you're interested in going to, click on pre-sale info, then click on the "more info" link to the left of the specific venue. If you're already logged in, you can just click here to go right to the presale overview page.

Many of you likely remember the fiasco surrounding chronic over-promiser Jason Lynes (aka Faction), who designed tshirts based on Nine Inch Nails concepts and artwork in an effort to seek out an official license. If you weren't around for that, it ended quite poorly - Jason not only had a bad string of printers, but apparently the concept of a proof was alien to him, and he'd take orders for shirts that he had never seen printed before.

Around the same time, though, I was contacted by a fellow named Aaron, who similarly was seeking out official license to print his own Nine Inch Nails tshirts. As the Faction thing fell apart, I told Aaron that I was going to wait at least a year and check back on his operation, to see if he could handle running things on his own. The last thing I wanted to do was give another fuckup any space on my website, only to have them fall behind, take the money and hide.

That was over a year ago. I've occasionally checked in and checked around, and I've heard good things about how they handle things at DYSD. Their line of shirts is still fairly limited, but that's partially due to the fact that the license they have to print their own designs is more expensive than what the larger companies have to pay. Nonetheless, they've been working hard over the last 15 months and I feel it's okay to send you along to check it out for yourself. On their very first blog they even mention holding off on taking pre-orders until they had their full inventory in stock.

You can view their NIN shirts here, with designs for Broken, Fixed, March of the Pigs, Closer to God, Further Down the Spiral, and Capital G currently available. This month all shirts happen to be on sale for $15 (Canadian), which as the old saying goes, is something like $5 US, right? (It's actually about $13.20) Check 'em out!

After a bit of server swapping and downtime. The NIN Historian site is back and updated:
https://www.theninhotline.com/nin_historian/
All recent Tour dates and future dates on the "Wave Goodbye" tour have been added and I created a section on the site just of my show reviews. I still have lots to do.. but wanted to let you know I'm not dead!

Also a ton of thanks to folks emailing me, sending ticket scans, and sharing their stories of seeing NIN on tour! Keep em coming!

NIN Historian

Trent released the dates for the club performances via twitter, and tour.nin.com earlier today. Four nights in NYC, two nights in Chicago, and four nights in LA.

Doing lots of catching up today! So back in February, we got an email from Ronnie Exley:


If February was the perfect time to release this work, I sure blew that! Thankfully, he's been really good about keeping on my ass to get this posted. Ronnie sent me a copy of the 70-page paper, which is licensed under a Creative Commons license, and since he doesn't have any place to host it, I've made the 5.3mb PDF available for download here. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, even though I've never worked in 'the industry.' If you are too, hopefully you'll find this to be an interesting read.

If you've been wondering what Jerome Dillon has been up to since nearly went quiet, we got word that has composed the score for the upcoming horror/thriller film, The Collector. Not "I pick things up," but "He always takes one." If it's anything like what I've heard from the score he did for Vacancy 2, look for a mix of percussion, drone work, and electronics. The film is set for release on July 31st in select US theaters, and you can check out the trailer on YouTube.

Quantities are limited, (particularly on the Demon Seed shirt), but we got 8 shirts and 2 babydolls from the Lights in the Sky tour over at The NIN Hotline Store. There are shirts for nearly every song on the Slip, and a couple of Ghosts shirts. All the tshirts are $12.99, and the babydoll shirts are $13.49

Pretty sure you're never going to see them for that price again, because once we're sold out, they're gone for good. Anyway, I didn't want to keep this to myself too long, so - enjoy!

(If you were following us on Twitter, you've probably already put your order in)

If you aren't following us on Twitter, you may not have heard that NIN are playing intimate venues in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in the near future. Trent tweeted about it and nin.com subsequently crashed.

Lucky for everyone, @she_shines92 thought fast and posted a screenshot of the news on Twitpic, where you can read it now while you wait for nin.com to brush itself off from the stampede.

The text of the update is as follows:

It is with heavy heart that I repost the message that appeared on the NIN.com front page early this morning:


Thanks also to all those who helped contribute to our Help Eric auctions over the past few weeks. While Eric has passed on, your generosity will not be forgotten, and will make its way to Eric's family in one form or another.

caspar from luckyPRICK sent word (over a week ago, whoops) that Kevin McMahon has launched a new website of his own - LuckyPierreMusic, along with a massive online store where you can pretty much buy his entire back catalog (as mp3s, FLACS and physical CDs) along with a bunch of new merch. Yeah, it's not really Nine Inch Nails news, but it's tangentially related and we post about tangentially related stuff when things get quiet here. So check it out when you get a moment.

Being a three-day weekend, I've managed to get enough done that I was idle to the point of making some long-needed (albeit minor) adjustments to our merch page. I've refined the eBay auction filters to better exclude unofficial junk, and changed the menu from an ugly text menu to a series of selections with associated graphics. I've also removed the Google Adsense banners at the top and bottom of the page, as they brought in maybe $1 a month, were ugly, and typically were completely unrelated. The end result should be a little more pleasing on the eyes, and hopefully a quick stop whenever you've got that urge to blow cash on NIN stuff.

...but did you know that "He was a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails Downward Spiral"? From a gearslutz thread revolving around posts by producers who'd worked with Michael Jackson, via Tom.

A tour date has been added to tour.nin.com, with the band now stopping off in Seoul, South Korea to perform at the ETP festival on August 15th. There's really not a whole lot more to post about this, so I'm going to quit typing and go outside to take in the awesome weather we're having in Philly.