Nine Inch Nails: "Steal Our Music"

A few months ago, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor blogged as follows:

As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. A couple of examples that quickly come to mind:

The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne's record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).

By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: "It's because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy."

So... I guess as a reward for being a "true fan" you get ripped off.

This got a lot of media attention, including from Rolling Stone Magazine.

At a live concert in Sydney on 16 September, Reznor had this to say (I've sanitised the not-safe-for-work language):

Last time I was here, I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, I called them out for being greedy [verb]ing [noun]holes.

I didn't get a chance to check, has the price come down at all?

[Chorus of "no!"'s from the crowd]

I see a no, a no, a no... Has anyone seen the price come down?

[Another chorus of "no!"'s from the crowd]

Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing. Because one way or another these [noun]s will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that that's not right.

[Cheers from the crowd]

I probably didn't make any friends by saying that...

Another nail in the coffin of "we're protecting the artists" / "we're acting in the artist's best interests"?  Authorisation of infringement?  Yes on both counts.

A bootleg video from the concert, posted on youtube, is available below.  To the extent that me embedding it constitutes "stealing", Trent Reznor told me to do it.