A little background:

At my house we recently acquired a Mac Powerbook G4 (the 12" model, for those interested). It works very well with our WiFi, and I've actually become quite fond of it. Frankly, if I had to do it all over again I would have probably gone Mac instead of Windows.

I'll pause while all you Mac folks shout "VINDICATION!!!"

Anyway, there is a neat application included with that Mac called GarageBand. It's basically a music composition/arrangement application, and since music is a hobby of mine (albeit a fairly neglected one until now), I've been playing with it quite a bit.

Well, color me surprised when I noticed a tidbit on Apple's page which pointed to this post on The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released one of his singles in GarageBand format. Opening it up in GarageBand allows you to mess with the tracks, the instruments used...pretty much everything to do with the song. You can arrange it as a country-western single. A gregorian chant. Whatever.

If you're interested, you can get to the download link from here. Keep in mind the file is pretty hefty...70 MB.

I know this is an experiment by NiN, but I still think it's pretty cool even if some of the comments on TUAW kind of go overboard with it all. Still, I'm hoping other artists follow suit. I'll leave it to our Future Intellectual Property attorney to explore the legal issues created by it, but for now I'm going to make The Hand That Feeds into a blues song.