If you were on Twitter at all yesterday you probably heard the big news. NIN frontman Trent Reznor - often hailed as the most tech-savvy man in the music biz – has given up on Web 2.0. How could one of the most prolific rock star Twitter users (641,977 followers at time of writing) pull such an abrupt about-face?

Reznor explains himself in an open letter posted on the NIN forums that is characteristically articulate and colorful. In it, he cites ‘idiots’ as his primary motivation for giving up on social media, saying,“I decided to lower the curtain a bit and let you see more of my personality. I watched some of you get more engaged because you started to realize there’s a person (flaws and all) back there, and I watched some of you recoil in horror because I’m not what you projected on me. All expected. I’m not as concerned about “breaking” your idea of NIN at this point. It is what it is and I am what I am.”

How real is too real?

This brings up a something I’ve actually been thinking a lot about lately. At what point does openness in social media go from being helpful to harmful in the artist/fan relationship?

Let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment. Celebrities – whether movie stars, rock stars or pro athletes – appeal to us largely because they’re unapproachable. We see the roles they play or listen to the songs they sing and we begin to build up a persona in our minds that we project on the celebrity. They become something larger than life, and when our access to them is limited there is nothing to contradict what we’ve imagined to be true. That’s exactly what happened with these NIN fans. They latched on to something in Reznor’s message and that became who he was to them.

“My world is upside-down.”

Then he joined Twitter and fell in love. Reznor hasn’t exactly been shy about his love life lately, and his updates have frequently been one-hundred and forty characters of romance, butterflies and batting eyelashes. I’ve put a few of them up for you here to check out yourselves. Not exactly the angry, self-loathing industrial music poster boy so many had come to idolize. These updates disrupted the image he had cultivated in the 90′s and which his legions of fans had since elaborated on. Some have seemed to grow with him, endeared by this softer side of Trent. Others hate him for ‘selling out’ and turning his back on everything he had preached for over a decade. As one fan put itin response to one of Reznor’s mushier updates, “My world is upside-down.”

Reznor responds to all of this in his letter, “I was not expecting to broadcast details of my love life there, but it happened because I’m in love and it’s all I think about and that’s that. If this has bummed you out or destroyed what you’ve projected on me, fair enough – it’s probably time for you to leave. You are right, I’m not the same person I was in 1994 (and I’m happy about that). Are you?”

Leave some mystery

Trent Reznor has every right to grow up. He should grow up! No one can keep writing the same words for ten years without starting to force it. Yet, it isn’t just that he is a happier, better adjusted individual than he was when he began his career. He simply communicated to much. The man behind the music revealed himself to be very little like the music he made and that just isn’t what many fans want. They want the entire experience of artist and art to be consistent.

If you plan on taking away all of the mystery and inference of your persona as an artist you can expect to turn a few people off. Just to be clear: I’m not in anyway advocating that musicians come up with some pre-planned alter-ego designed to best compliment the type of image they’re going for. I’m just trying to be realistic about what it means to be an artist. Build relationships and be authentic – but remember to leave a little mystery, too. Authenticity is not about divulging every thought that runs through your head, it’s about being honest in what you say and do. Even being a little vulnerable. I don’t think that Reznor will be the last high profile artist to recognize the double-edged nature that social media can be in the artist/fan relationship.

The lesson here? Bare your soul in your music, not on Twitter.