Music from the machine

Excellent profile by The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson of Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. It’s behind The New Yorker’s usual paywall, but if you have access it’s a really engrossing read (admittedly as a huge NIN fan since my teenage years I’m probably a bit biased in this regard.)

There’s some interesting tech news here as well: Reznor is working with Beats Electronics on the design of a new music-streaming service that will compete with Spotify and Rdio. He argues Spotify is like “being on the web without Google” and he has a point. As noted earlier today, music curation is a huge challenge to crack. Will this new Beats offer anything really different? We’ll see.