RIAA chases P2P distributors of 'promotion' singles

POPULAR BEAT combo Nine Inch Nails is having trouble with the RIAA over the online promotion of its new album, "Year Zero".

The outfit released an Internet scavenger hunt where fans look for MP3 singles. The idea started out in February when Web-savvy fans discovered that highlighted letters inside words on a Nine Inch Nails tour T-shirt spelled out "I am trying to believe." When they put a ".com" infront of the encoded word they got to a website.

Another fan found a USB drive in a bathroom stall during a NIN concert at the Coliseum in Lisbon, Portugal. This flash drive contained an MP3 of album track "My Violent Heart." Additional USB drives were purportedly found in Barcelona and Manchester, England; they included MP3s of album tracks "Me, I'm Not" and "In This Twilight," respectively. The drives were stuck in the loos by the band promotion people.

The big idea was that fans would start swapping the music files online and start talking about the album, which is exactly what happened.

According to Billboard, it all backfired when the RIAA started sending out emails to fans threatening to sue them into a coma and demanding huge amounts of money for each single they shared.

It also demanded that fans start to remove the single from their sites claiming that they were in breach of copyright.

Apparently the complete album has not been leaked onto the file sharing networks and the only singles out there are the ones that the band has approved of, which seems to suggest that it has not been troubled by p2p piracy.

More here.