“Everybody has a different opinion about leaks,” says Hopeless’ Harrison. “I have a lot of respect for the media’s right to do whatever they want to. Trying to hide information is futile. We’ve encountered that situation in the past of ‘This person leaked the news. Demand they take it down.’ Now if Alternative Press started doing that, I wouldn’t have any problem with that—but you would never get any information from me. Say we had a band with a similar situation like Fall Out Boy, and we gave you the information and you ran with it immediately online. You could run with it, but we’d have a hard time doing something with you for the record release because of the feelings coming out of it. It’s not just me—it’s management, band members, and agents. All it takes is one person to get butt-hurt about something.”

Zarrillo says he considered the leaking of Fall Out Boy’s reconvening, dealing with two straight months of stress and panic attacks before he actually posted the information onto his site. Years ago, he interned at Crush, the management company that represents Fall Out Boy, Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes. Now Zarrillo describes any relationship with that organization as “bridges that I was comfortable torching to the ground,” because he knew of the band’s resonance as “the second biggest band in our scene of all time—next to Blink or Green Day—are coming back for a reunion, and they’ve sold 10 million albums. It’s not like an Armor For Sleep reunion. At the end of the day it was, ‘Do I want to burn these bridges with the management company that manages bands I’m not going to do a lot of work with in the first place because I’m not Access Hollywood?’ Because when you sell millions of singles, you don’t necessarily need to do press with a website like Property Of Zack or Absolute Punk.”

When Zarrillo posted the information ahead of the official announcement on Fall Out Boy’s site, he says he got a healthy amount of backlash from visitors who “doubted the site and said they’d never come back. Which I expected: I expected the band to deny it, I expected countless fans to not believe it.” But he had also received a significant number of new visitors, as well as a wave of apology posts from detractors, “who trust the site now because we told them their favorite band of all time [are] coming back.” FOB’s complete rollout ended up being divulged online the night before by Philip Obenschain over at the No Country For New Nashville blog. Zarrillo says he knew all the exact information Obenschain did, as well as other elements to their rollout that have yet to be made public. “I was interested in ruining [the announcement],” he says. “I wasn’t interested in saying Fall Out Boy are going on tour or that they have a new album ready to go. I was just interested in letting people know they were coming back. Part of me working with people who trusted me enough for them to be my source was not ruining everything.”

All of the people interviewed for this story shared feelings of resignation, futility and gamesmanship strategy regarding the way information is disseminated. But the culture of needing to know first is part and parcel of this scene of loud-music-played-really-quickly-on-guitars (which kind of encapsulates nearly every subgenre in our Warped Tour nation community). You have to wonder if similar music cultures are as passionate. Would the internet fall apart over the leaking of premature reunion news of, say, Sugar Ray?

“I’m very happy when kids are trying to ruin the surprise,” says KMGMT’s Kaminsky. “It means they’re engaged. If nobody’s hungry for it, it’s going to come out and not make a dent. There have been times when leaks have spoiled a project we’ve been working on. But you know what? That means we need to step up our game. If you’re not thinking three steps ahead, you’re going to fall behind.”

“Does it ruin things?” ponders Hopeless’ Harrison about info leaks. “All you gotta know is these things are going to happen and plan around them. It ruins things if your whole plan hinges on it being kept secret.”

“You can’t get real upset about these things,” says Charm School’s Welch. “Does it matter? Are we curing cancer by doing this?”

“Is the big rollout important?” asks Lyman. “Absolutely not. I think we hold on to those old models of doing things. When the information is ready, you need to put it out. You want information to come from the source, but people still feel this need to get it out first—even when you ask them not to.”

The way Zarrillo sees it, the future of music journalism is all about speed first—with reflection to follow. “[Writers] need to be quicker. I understand that someone is going to get pissed when something leaks. But you can’t hold grudges anymore as much as you need to fucking go for it. AltPress isn’t going to leak ‘Fall Out Boy are coming back’ for a whole lot of reasons. But I’m always going to be doing this. I’m not scared of burning a bridge if the benefit is much better than the cost.”

Zarrillo did get to see Fall Out Boy’s recent New York City reunion show. But to the surprise of no one, he wasn’t on a guest list. “I did pay for a ticket,” he says. “It was an incredible show. I did not get a chance to see them in Philly though, because it sold out in 20 seconds.” alt