Trent Reznor on what new musicians should do.

Over the past couple of years Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor has proven himself to be one of the more new media savvy musicians around and the way that he has engaged with his fanbase through twitter and blogs has demonstrated that he understands the challenges caused by the changes in the music business in the last decade better than most, in fact someone told me before that he himself was the person who originally uploaded the torrent of one of his more recent releases to the what.cd torrent tracker.

In a recent blog post that you can read here Reznor gave advice on how new bands should attempt to go about their business in the most sensible fashion. In some ways it's a 21st century update of The Minutemen's "jam econo" philosophy and many of these ideas are quite obvious and I'd imagine that most bands that most people have not heard are doing some of them but to have them all distilled into one article is very useful. They're certainly more relevant and useful than the Steve Albini penned "major labels are the devil" screeds that have been floating around the web for the past decade which were pretty much the last lengthy writings on the subject by a significant musical figure before this one as far as I'm aware.