Fresh on the heals of Radiohead’s announcement of the you-name-the-price In Rainbows album (due tomorrow), perhaps the poster child of the ‘DRM sucks, record companies are lame’ movement, Trent Reznor, has just announced that Nine Inch Nails is now free of a record contract and will move forward with getting music to the fans “as I see fit and appropriate”. This likely means two things for certain: 1) completely DRM-free and 2) either free or very cheap directly to the fans.

Reznor has been a visionary with both unique marketing campaigns (leaking songs via memory sticks in bathroom stalls at concerts) and spreading the word that the record labels care about one thing: money – and if the RIAA has to sue each and every fan just trying to download a pre-release of their favorite bands, so be it.

Now obviously that isn’t the case every time, sometimes people are just out there stealing music, but with DRM dying a quick death now it’s becoming clear that the only way anyone is going to stop this is either a) to restrict the Internet or b) to start thinking differently about the way music is distributed and consumed. Point ‘a’ is not going to happen so the recording industry needs to wake up and start coming up with new solutions.

Reznor, just one artist, has already come up with quite a few interesting new ideas from the USB drives in stalls, to color-changing CDs (the ONLY physical CD I’ve bought this year), to giving away the music source files to fans to completely remix as they see fit in the Apple music app GarageBand. If one man can come up with these how come companies with thousands of employees can’t?

While NIN, like Radiohead, is in a unique position of already having had a lot of commercial success and can afford to take risks like this, these moves will be extremely important for sending the labels a message: you are out of touch and losing not only your customers, but now your artists as well (though Radiohead does supposedly still plan to sign a new deal eventually).

Reznor’s post on the nin.com site has 748 comments so far – which as far as I can tell all of which are extremely positive. Apparently record execs don’t read website comments. Add it to the list of things they should be doing.