fragility

My nickname on a Year Zero site ?!

The latest chapter in the Year Zero ARG makes all NIN fans part of it. Well, at least all of those who are part of The Spiral or Echoing The Sound (and believe me, that’s a lot of people: NIN has a huge online community). I’m 24.24.2.2468 on this page. Looks like i won’t be dead or anything 15 years in the future :)

Also, some fans had their “avatars” embedded on the newly released audio files for some songs at the album website.

This is probably one of the biggest political and marketing campaigns ever made around an album (it has become way more of a political than a marketing thing), and i believe not many fan communities can brag about a band giving back so much to it’s fans: the whole ARG thing, the audio files for remixing (and the whole album is going to be released that way), free underground shows (at least one until this point) and have everyone from the two main online communities being mentioned in this whole thing, specially Darren Kroupa.

And the whole way this thing has spread around through the web, with fans collaborating on forums, setting up wiki’s, jabber bots, irc channels, will probably be (or it’s already being) the subject of many talks about the way ARG’s are being used for marketing and other purposes. I’m not sure about this, but from what i’ve read looks like this is one of the biggest and more complex ARG’s ever made.

Will this go on ? Looks like. One thing is for sure: these are great days to be a NIN fan, and it’s no wonder everyone (old and new alike) are reacting to this like 12 year old kids, going all “OMG WOW WTF ?!”.

Me included !

“Our” efforts have been recognized. And this is just the beginning.

Not really Open Source software…but nice to see the expression involved in all this.

Check this and this if you don’t understand.

Are these guys going to leak the entire album on USB thumb drives left at their shows throughout the current tour ? Looks like it. And if it is, maybe Trent is really sending out a big f. you to the music industry. I’m also thinking what consequences it would have if they did this on the states.

NIN just leaked a new song here in Portugal and Spain (the information is not really accurate) on an usb thumb drive left intentionally in the bathrooms. Apparently, it’s all part of a bigger picture, an alternate reality game to promote the new album (Year Zero) built around it’s concept. Apart from the song (and the hidden image on it, found using a spectrograph), there are “future websites”, and information on the 2007 tour t-shirts (i have one of those, with the “numbers”), which led to the websites and a phone number. You can read all about it here.

And by the way, their show was great !