Looks like Nine Inch Nails are poised to pull a Radiohead. In a move that everybody and their mother saw coming (see here, here, here, and here), Reznor has ended his relationship with Universal and calls himself a "free agent."
He wrote on the NIN site under the heading "Big News": "Hello everyone. I've waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed."
This "direct relationship" no doubt means self-releasing albums from now on, something Reznor will almost certainly do via the NIN site.
Almost all of the 907 comments (thus far) from fans are completely positive. The only people that aren't really going to be into this are the record labels, who need to think fast. First Radiohead, now Nine Inch Nails...let the collapse begin.
