This song Zero Sum is from the Nine Inch Nails 2005 Year Zero album, which Trent Reznor composed on a laptop and recorded as he went on the road touring in support of the group's previous release, With Teeth (2005).

This kind of composition opens up a different way of making music and brings it into play with remixing and the music public's participatory role in interpreting compositions at home through Apple's Garage Band software.

David Hajdu in I Me Mine in The New Republic says that Reznor has made the musical stems of several past Nine Inch Nails available for re-mixing at no cost through the Nine Inch Nails site.

Hajdu says that:

Reznor is so eager to be aligned with the home-remixing phenomenon that he has sponsored a compilation album of fan remixes. Called The Limitless Potential, the album of 21 selections can be downloaded free, although the individual stems of the tracks that the fans contributed are not accessible for further remixing through the Nine Inch Nails site. (Evidently the "open" in open-sourcing has its limits.) Most of the Nine Inch Nails remixes posted, like the Nude remixes, are efforts to move the songs from one mode - industrial rock, the style Reznor practically invented in the 1980s - to some other style: house music, or psychedelia, or an approximation of funk. The remixes tend to take lateral steps, hopping across category lines from stylistic box to box. They do not, as a rule, try to differ from the originals in point of view or depth or aesthetic value; they seek to differ primarily in kind.

The other aspect of Year Zero is that it was accompanied by an alternate reality game by 42 Entertainment and a possible film project that lasts three years. An interesting approach to viral marketing.