To many in the record business, the October 8 announcement that Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor had ditched his record label, Interscope, may have come as a shock. After all, the industry was still reeling from Radiohead’s announcement, just a week before, that it would release its album, In Rainbows, online for a price to be determined by individual fans. But Reznor’s desire to be “free of any recording contract,” and “have a direct relationship with the audience,” should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed his actions for the last several months.

Last spring, Reznor released the “master tracks,” or the separate musical parts from many of his recent songs on his website, nin.com. He put up the master tracks for free, without any legal fine print about how they could be used or distributed. Since then, high quality fan-generated remixes have been appearing online on fan sites both new and old. In early September, the web master of one fan site decided to compile some of the better remixes into something resembling an album.

Dubbed The Limitless Potential, the 21-track collection of remixes was released for free at 9inchnails.com, and through the file sharing software BitTorrent, complete with printable artwork. The tracks were selected from over 200 fan-generated submissions, as part of a contest run through 9inchnails.com.

Matt Brink, the site’s 34-year-old webmaster, says he thought of the idea in March, after completing a redesign of 9inchnails.com, and realizing he was running a music fan site without any music on it. After listening to the innumerable fan mixes on another site, NINRemixes.com, he decided to solicit his own.

“I came up with the idea of a contest and just collecting the best [remixes],” said Brink. “So people don’t have to sift through all the mediocre and less than mediocre, just to get to the good ones.”

Brink says he and a handful of other fans from the 9inchnails.com forum listened to all the songs submitted, and voted for their favorites. The winner received a package of Nine Inch Nails merchandise from Hot Topic, while the runner up received a similar package from FactionNation.com, which until recently sold unofficial Nine Inch Nails shirts and stickers.

There has been no word from Reznor about whether he approves of this type of fan-generated content. But in a sense, by releasing master tracks without any restrictions, Reznor solicited these remixes as much as the webmaster that ran the contest.

For his part, Ben Youngs, winner of the fan-remix contest, who has two of his remixes on The Limitless Potential, thinks that fan remixes, no matter how good they are, won’t hurt sales of the official Nine Inch Nails remix CD.

“The Limitless Potential was popular because it was free,” said Youngs. “The official remix album will sell just fine because NIN fans are avid collectors, regardless of the content.”

But selling records might not be high on the list of Trent Reznor’s concerns. On-stage in September at a sold-out concert in Australia, he told fans to steal his records, because of frustrations over the high price of his albums in the country.

“Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing,” said Reznor to thousands of screaming fans. “One way or another, these mother fuckers will get it through their heads that they’re ripping people off, and that’s not right.”

Regardless of how the record industry is affected by the recent wave of major artists leaving major labels, Youngs, who prefers remixing other artists to making his own music, thinks allowing fans a greater level of interactivity with the art they admire and enjoy can only mean good things for both artists and labels.

“Letting fans remix your music won’t make you any cash, but I think doing so is a wonderful way for a fan to really interact with the music,” said Youngs. “And if you don’t have fans, you won’t sell any CDs.”

Reznor’s last release for Interscope Records, scheduled for release in November, is an official remix album entitled Y34RZ3R0R3MIX3D. Thirteen of the 14 tracks will be mixed by professional musicians, but one, the third track, will be a fan-generated remix.

“The Pirate Robot Midget mix is a fan’s work,” wrote Reznor on nin.com. “I thought it was great, it filled a need and I asked permission to use it.”

Clearly Reznor is banking on fan-generated content to promote the next stage of his career, sans-record label. But it seems he still craves some control over content what fans do with his songs. According to Reznor’s latest post on nin.com, he will soon launch a Nine Inch Nails remix site of his own, at remix.nin.com.

***

Next up: Enough of this music shit. Onward and upward to a look at the cultural relevance of video games.