LOL...relax, man, I'm not mad at all, and I certainly don't want to seem that way, I just wanted to clarify what I believe Mark's intentions were. When they were faced with the possibility of either opening for a bigger band and bigger venues or headlining smaller venues, Mark chose to focus on the smaller venues so that he and the rest of AB could be closer to their fans, hang out with them, and so forth. Other than wanting to avoid the Creed connection as much as possible (despite having to deal with the questions all the time), the focus on smaller venues is how Mark wanted to begin. If they had chosen to focus on being an opening act, it may have been more successful in the short term, but I think that Mark was looking at the long term, and wanted to have a strong fan base.
No, they can't release it themselves apparently...I would imagine that it has something to do with their contract, as Mark clearly stated in that interview that the band would have even funded it themselves. This illustrates just how much WU DOESN'T want to promote AB...when the band offers to pay for the whole thing, and the label STILL won't release it, it would seem that the label has NO intention of helping AB AT ALL, and, in this case, it also seems as if they will even HINDER AB at expense to themselves when at all possible...because, in this case, if the band paid for everything else, and WU were only paying for distribution, WU is the ONLY one in that scenario that is almost GUARANTEED a profit of SOME sort...instead, they would rather see AB fail than to even make ANY money helping them at ALL...
And this is the most infuriating thing about it all...Windup are really more vindictive than they are stupid. They seem to be angry at AB because AB refused Windup's suggestions to take steps to capitalize off of Creed's former success (like they are doing with Stapp currently), so, instead of coming up with another strategy for AB, they seem to be putting a stop to the AB promotion altogether. Then, they got to put their strategy into motion with Stapp, who clearly didn't have a problem with using Creed in his promotion, and Windup is seeing right now that the strategy they had for AB CLEARLY isn't working very well for Stapp, which would prove them WRONG, but, instead of admitting the mistake (and this is where their stupidity IS coming into play), they are going to run themselves into the ground to make Stapp a success at ALL COSTS...hopefully, Windup will ride that strategy out until they're bankrupt...