Idolator

Over the weekend, a new Nine Inch Nails song emerged, and that would seem to have been the warmup for this morning's wee-hour release of the slip, a.k.a. Halo 27; the 10-track, 43-minute album is free to all takers as long as you give the NIN site's robots an e-mail address. "Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years—this one's on me," Reznor said in a parenthetical aside on his blog. Someone buy that man a protein shake! Details of the release after the jump.

• The album's available in MP3, FLAC, Apple lossless, and WAV format.
• The FLAC, Apple lossless, and WAV versions of the album are being distributed via BitTorrent because of the huge file sizes, while the MP3 version is a plain old download.
• Downloading the MP3 version was pretty easy—no server crashes or endless "Please wait..." messages.
• The album's protected by a Creative Commons license that allows remixers to remix, bloggers to blog, or people who troll arena bathrooms to leave it on USB drives in stalls.
• CD and vinyl versions of the album will be out in July, with "details to come." Is it too much to hope for a 3-inch CD box set that's free with a street address? Probably.
• The first person to comment on Reznor's blog post announcing the album did, in fact, say "FIRST." Ah, Internet.

the slip [dl.nin.com]