In an interview with the Australian Herald Sun, Trent Reznor says:
I’ve have one record left that I owe a major label, then I will never be seen in a situation like this again. If I could do what I want right now, I would put out my next album, you could download it from my site at as high a bit-rate as you want, pay $4 through PayPal. Come see the show and buy a T-shirt if you like it. I would put out a nicely packaged merchandise piece, if you want to own a physical thing. And it would come out the day that it’s done in the studio, not this “Let’s wait three months” bulls—.
Wow. Also:
I steal music too, I’m not gonna say I don’t. But it’s tough not to resent people for doing it when you’re the guy making the music, that would like to reap a benefit from that. On the other hand, you got record labels that are doing everything they can to piss people off and rip them off.
Putting Rick Rubin in charge of Columbia Records was a good start, but they’d be better off just closing shop because eventually every artist is going to come to the same realization that Prince, Trent and Paul McCartney have come to: you don’t need those people. The record companies, from what I can tell, do absolutely nothing right. They steal from artists, they take a huge portion of the profits, and they do everything they can to alienate music fans.
Just close it all down, people. To quote Michael Dell out of context: “Shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”