Originally Posted by
Rob_Sheridan
"I made the mistake of wandering back to this question's thread after seeing the Pitchfork headline... The original poster didn't deserve a legitimate response, but since this is apparently a question that some people have, let me chime in and shut it down... Why was NIN announced right at this time? The answer is we DIDN'T WANT TO ANNOUNCE NIN YET. We put it off as long as possible to give HTDA time to breathe before getting steamrolled by the NIN news. But when you book festival gigs, they have their own marketing rollout that is beyond our control and have specific times they need to announce their lineups. Even though the festivals don't happen until July and August, they happened to schedule their announcements right at the time we were releasing HTDA. So we had no choice but to make the NIN announcement. Not only is Trent not using NIN to help market HTDA or whatever garbage the armchair quarterbacking original poster spewed, we actively did NOT want the two to overlap. In fact, the HTDA album was supposed to come out last year, but then the Coachella opportunity came up, and in planning out a marketing strategy that would give HTDA the most exposure, it made a lot more sense to wait and release the album around the time Coachella was being announced. This ran the risk of putting HTDA a lot closer to NIN (which was already being planned) than we'd wanted, but it was the best thing to do for the project. There are complex logistics involved in how tours are planned, budgets and schedules, marketing strategies, production concerns, and a billion other things, and trying to do what's best for two projects at the same time sometimes means there will be sacrifices here and there. Also, no one's getting rich off of HTDA. Even the money we'd make from something big like Coachella goes back 100% into the production budget so we can have a great live show. We're doing it because we think it's cool and we like making art, and that's really it. We want as many people as possible to hear about that art, so that led to the record label idea. And the relationship we've had with Columbia on this project has been great - it's allowed us to have budgets to do things like make more videos, and it's gotten us a level of exposure for the project we couldn't have achieved on our own. Turns out (some) record labels have changed quite a bit since the industry took a shit. Funny thing, when all the money leaves an industry, a lot of the money-grubbing assholes leave too. Most of the people we work with at Columbia are young, and are just music fans who want to make cool stuff happen. It's never going to be perfect, and we'll always miss having that heavy control we get doing things on our own, but so far this experiment has worked out well for the very specific needs of this project."