alt Hacker News> However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
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NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums
And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
(p.s. wot up volk)
I got invited to see a NIN show recently, which was very kind of them.
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
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(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
Whoops.)