For weeks, Apple has been hyping up the debut of its new Apple Music streaming service, which went live Tuesday. The star-studded launch includes some music users can’t get on any other streaming service, including Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Taylor Swift’s 1989. But that’s not all.
In addition, Apple’s Chief Creative Director and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor told Rolling Stone that he, too, would be including unreleased work.
“When the service goes live, the first thing I’ve put up is something I couldn’t have done or wouldn’t have done anywhere else, which is the entire album The Fragile as an instrumental-outtakes compilation that plays like a regular album but sounds very different without my voice in the way. And there’s different arrangements to certain songs and oddly that makes for a different, complementary music experience. So that’ll be there as soon as you download the app, you’ll see that in, on my Connect page.”
Reznor, who has been involved with the project since the Beats acquisition, talked candidly about creating a streaming service that would allow fans and artists to connect on a much more human level.
“There’s a lot of stuff coming that are providing tools that haven’t existed as elegantly and as unified as we’re doing it. That feels like a worthwhile thing to me to invest my time. And providing a place where the fan can be turned on to music in a way that feels sincere and feels genuine, surrounded by people that actually love music and know it and present it in a way that’s engaging – and to the artist, having access to larger and different audience than they’ve ever had before, as well as the empowerment tools to engage that audience – that feels worth my time.”
When asked about working on new music, Reznor took a “it’s the journey, not the destination” approach to his answer:
“Yeah, I’ve been messing around with some things. And I went through a period of ‘tour, tour, tour.’ Things right after another, with scores and what I’ve been doing whilst working on Apple music here is what I call “laboratory time,” more experiments without any definite agenda.
He also touched on creative integrity and the freedom of not being beholden to a label, saying:
“It’s not for a thing, it’s not a record I’m trying to finish in a month. It’s more just feeling around in the dark and seeing what sounds interesting. It’s nice to do that every few years to try and reinvent and discover and try to learn about yourself and what feels exciting to you as an artist.”
(Via Consequence of Sound and Rolling Stone)
