Nine Inch Nails’ new EP isn’t an Apple Music exclusive

Industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails today announced that it will release a new five-track EP, Not the Actual Events, at 12:01 a.m. Pacific on December 23. Fans can now preorder a one-sided vinyl and a “digital + physical component version” of the album through the band’s website.

“It’s an unfriendly, fairly impenetrable record that we needed to make,” frontman Trent Reznor is quoted as saying in a statement. “It’s an EP because that ended up being the proper length to tell that story.”

For people who aren’t NIN fans, this news wouldn’t be interesting, except that there’s an Apple angle.

The self-released EP will be available “on all digital platforms” on December 23. In other words, it won’t be an Apple Music exclusive, despite that Reznor is one of the biggest stars of Apple’s music streaming service, following Apple’s 2014 acquisition of Beats. Reznor reportedly contributed to the redesign of the app earlier this year.

Apple has sought to make Apple Music stand out from other streaming services with exclusive releases of music and videos.

This is the band’s first major release since the Hesitation Marks record from 2013. The band has since released some music it made for movies. Plus, in 2013 it came out with a Spotify exclusive, Live 2013 EP, and in January 2014, shortly before the announcement of the Beats acquisition, it released the Seed Eight remix EP exclusively on Beats. There was also the unofficial Recoiled EP from 2014.

But last year Reznor did personally release instrumental versions of 1999’s the Fragile and 2005’s With Teeth exclusively on Apple Music.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.