The Slip (2008)

Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder · 2008 · 43 min

Two months after Ghosts, and this time with songs. The Slip went up on nin.com on 5 May 2008 with a one-line note — "this one's on me" — free to everyone, no tiers, no pre-order, a Creative Commons licence attached, and it is the more conventional record for it: ten tracks, forty-three minutes, verses and choruses, Discipline as the single. It is a proper Nine Inch Nails album that happens to have been given away, which is a different thing from an experiment.

It is also a leaner, angrier record than its reputation as the "free one" suggests. 1,000,000 and Letting You are as fast as anything since Broken; Lights in the Sky is a piano ballad Reznor has played at nearly every show since; Corona Radiata is seven minutes of drone that points straight at the film-score career to come. The lossless files are the band's own.

Chosen copy: the band's release on the Internet Archive, item nine_inch_nails_the_slip, uploaded 2008-05-09, four days after release — 10 FLAC files, one per track, contiguously numbered (01_999999.flac … 10_demon_seed.flac), 262 MB, 43 min, with two cover images and the PDF booklet alongside.

Checked against the ten-track listing before staging: no gaps, no duplicates, running order correct once sorted. The collection also holds an M4A set and the multitrack stems (a different product, not a copy of the album).

One layer, the artist's own licence:

• The licence. The Slip was released 2008-05-05 under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States; the Archive.org item carries the licence URL and its description states it. Yours to download, keep, seed, share and rework under the same licence; not for sale or commercial use — the band's term, passed through unchanged.
• Provenance. Uploaded the week of release from the band's own files. The physical CD/DVD edition that followed in July 2008 is a separate, commercial release and is not what this torrent carries.

Nine Inch Nails, The Slip (2008), released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US