NIN Against RIAA: Mystery CD Stirs Already Rumored Crowds

Remember the story of the USB thumbdrives hidden in restrooms during the Nine Inch Nails promo tour, which contained un-released (at that time) tracks for the inquisitive fans? Remember how people who found such memory sticks loaded with music have posted the tracks online in a freshly-created community and how RIAA bitterly reacted against those sites requesting cease-and-desist?

Well, things aren't over yet! Au contraire, a wave of sheer mysticism has veiled the launching of the latest NIN album on CD as people who bought it have soon discovered a most disturbing fact. After playing the (initially black) CD in their players, the disc changed color and a very strange thing came out (as visible as in the attached picture): the CD went all grey and let the owners read a very intriguing binary code sequence!

Actually it seems like this is the "original" look of the Year Zero album. The mystery was far from over - a smart buyer copied the binary code he found on the "new" NIN disc and translated it into human alphabet, just to see that it actually represented a link to a(nother) mystery website containing a very strange collection of texts and audio allegedly coming from various leaks in the surveillance systems across the country.

By far it looks like a very refined and even subtle attack on RIAA and their reaction towards the previous public release of NIN tracks... yet the other NIN forums are stirring quite a lot as many weird sites have been recently discovered to sport hidden or mysterious messages in them, all relating to a Shawshank Redemption quote regarding issues like fear and imprisonment, with a rather direct target to RIAA surveying music listeners.


Various voices claim a very worrying interpretation of all this in a rather dark way: the familiarity of imprisonment versus the fear of being free but "under watch". Still, things are very messed up and it seems like some clear explanations (or furthermore darkening things) could come from the band itself or from at least their frontman, Trent Reznor, who is most likely behind this very cool new approach to making and releasing CDs.