In the spirit of all the very cool fan related stuff going on in the world on NIN right now, I thought this would be a great time to submit something of my personal craft. In August I finished up an Undergraduate Research Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Under the Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, I created my own field of research titled "Information Technology, Innovation and Consumerism". For six months I worked on the following dissertation regarding the future of the music industry in the wake of innovative technologies in digital music such as file-sharing, viral marketing and Creative Commons licensing. This work covers over 2 years of research that began in the fall of 2006. The work focuses largely on the efforts of Trent Reznor in leading the revolutionary methods of digital music distribution and marketing starting with the Year Zero effort. As it seems Trent is always on the verge of releasing something new and surprising, now is a perfect time to release this work to the NIN community as it is still highly relevant and takes into account his most current material.
If February was the perfect time to release this work, I sure blew that! Thankfully, he's been really good about keeping on my ass to get this posted. Ronnie sent me a copy of the 70-page paper, which is licensed under a Creative Commons license, and since he doesn't have any place to host it, I've made the 5.3mb PDF available for download here. I can't help it, I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, even though I've never worked in 'the industry.' If you are too, hopefully you'll find this to be an interesting read.