Bronzerat is a humble home for a small bunch of extremely hard-working artists and their guardian angels, who don’t follow the crowd but stray from the pack. Tech interview with label owner below:

Hi Andy, please could you introduce Bronzerat and its roster?
Bronzerat is a humble home for a small bunch of extremely hard-working artists and their guardian angels, who don’t follow the crowd but stray from the pack. All of us here would be lost in the wilderness, but we make such a big racket, and shake so many trees, that people can’t help but hear our cries, and the music is so beautiful and ubiquitous that we are ‘collecting’ members to our cult, like pollen to a bee, at a rate of (this week) three people every 10 minutes .

You know you have to dig a lot deeper, and listen a lot harder to find the good stuff. We go for timelessness. None of our artists choose to make music, they just make music. All the time. And craft it over time. And so we don’t have any gap-year bands filling in time between university, backpacking and estate-agency, no Shoreditch fashionistas imitating Baby Shambles. Just champions of love, beauty and bile.

They are: Heavy Trash, Gemma Ray, Joe Gideon & The Shark, Trost, To Arms Etc, Solex vs Jon Spencer & Cristina Martinez, Congregation, Seasick Steve, Charles Campbell-Jones, Vandaveer.

Running a label in 2010 seems very adventurous for a lot of people: what do you think? Do you think a label is still relevant in 2010? How the label’s role evolved during the last couple of years?

Yes, in fact it’s absolutely insane if you are just intending to be a record label in the traditional sense. But when I started Bronzerat Records 4 years ago, I did not know what being a record label entailed really, so I actually entered it with no definite role or parameters. I come from a musician and tour management background, playing in lots of bands (I still do, and always will), and helping other bands out on tour. I always tried to get deals with other indie labels, or publishers, and tried to get people down to shows, to book shows, promote, make demos, manufacture them. We just tried to join the dots. We had a vision that we hoped someone in a ‘position of knowledge and power’ would share and be able to take it to that next level of exposure. Invariably they did not. But in the process, I had an accidental general music management education, completely by default of ‘chasing the dream’.

It was only a matter of time that I would seek out distribution, thus becoming a ‘legitimate’ label. It all came together for me when I teamed up with Gemma Ray and Charles Campbell-Jones, firstly as a band member, but then something happened and I fell into the role of ‘godfather’! It was a little community of musicians saying ‘fuck you’ to what we perceived to be some kind of larger tasteless clique.

The label is a shopfront, and Bronzerat happens to have the word ‘Records’ after it. But the label side is only part of it. We have a totally holistic approach, simply because we just did anyway. So we’ll do whatever we think needs doing, if we can do it, and get some outside help if we can’t. It’s a learning curve in a lot of ways, but we’ve started publishing now too, once we realized that we were being fucked by the ‘rights’ societies. By we, I absolutely mean the songwriters too.

There’s too many boys clubs in the industry, and you know what: fuck ‘em. Music was rebellion and escape from the establishment for me. It pains me now, within the belly of the beast, to see a lot of the wealth being drained by music-hating parasitic Masons posing as administration and law, or as go-betweens. Corporate sponsorship has stealthily become corporate ownership because of this club.

Do you think there’s still a future for an indie label in 2010? How do you see it?
I elaborate more on this point below, but I think that there is a hell of a lot of music out there. It is easy for people to make and promote music and unfortunately a lot of it is horrible, at best mediocre. Far be it for me to lay claim to some kind of exquisite taste (and I am not, by the way. History will decide in the end), but someone needs to separate the wheat from the chaff. That could be an indie label, and sometimes it is. And the ones who are exceptionally good at it will prevail. That is why Domino do.

For example, when I was a teenager, I loved Dead Kennedys (and still do), and then through their label Alternative Tentacles I discovered Nomeansno. It’s like a guide book. Magazines and websites and radio DJ’s (ha!) can do that too of course but it’s completely different. And here’s why: nowadays, because of the very tough times, when you see a truly self-funded independent label lay it on the line for an artist, they must really believe (maybe blindly) that they are supporting something special. I sank all of my last wages, and stole money from my sister to press up the first Seasick Steve album. For two months we both lived in a cardboard box behind my local Tescos, until the first royalty cheque arrived in the PO Box I set up.

I’m told Lawrence from Domino re-mortgaged his house in order to pay for the Franz Ferdinand album. In these two cases it paid off, which is quite rare.

We are again laying it all on the line for Gemma Ray and Joe Gideon & The Shark, and Solex vs Jon Spencer for example. It’s risky business for optimistic dreamers.

There is definitely a future for indie labels, but only indie labels who consistently find exceptional music and are good at lifting that music high above the throng. And as discussed above, that means thinking outside being a label.

Majors will be ok for a short while, because they can spend, spend, spend and force, force, force that artist into the supermarkets next to the chewing gum next to the till, into the primetime adverts on TV and literally brainwash the casual shopper that makes up the majority of the Western population.

Internet has changed a lot of things in the music business: faster communication, new way to monetize music but also piracy. For your experience what are the pros and cons?
Firstly, I think Internet has changed a lot of things in society as a whole. Communities are virtual, more freely choice-based, and so as a result more numerous . The result is that all of society becomes more fragmented and disparate. There is more music, there is more choice. Total saturation. And so what is happening is that either people stop choosing from simply being over-whelmed (maybe even stop looking), or their choices are less likely to be controlled by mass media and so more random.

Sub-cultures become more numerous, meaning that there is less likely to be a community-based sub-cultural revolution with as much impact as, say, the emergence of punk. Because all the big movements, be they political or cultural have been the result of real-life interactions which have spread and spread from real places – clubs, pubs, hang-outs, (but propped up by big business. That’s not a dig. Dischord became big business because it just did).

BUT, the Facebook-driven Rage Against The Machine for Xmas Number 1 campaign proves that if people care enough about something, then the internet can bring people together. In this case, people had something in common – a hatred for the monopoly of music television.

I’d like to think that that could happen on a bigger more important global scale. It would be amazing if someone started a focused campaign to ban religious education from schools and make Darwinism mandatory basic curriculum, in such a way that it actually did grow to a level that could not be ignored.

So it depends on your point of view. If the internet is sending people into smaller communities where they are not so susceptible to mass media marketing, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

It is what it is.

Faster communication is great for communication, but not necessarily a good thing. It is not that natural. It does not allow people enough space to nurture ideas, or to fall in love over time, or to appreciate that we are still just animals that need to get out and exercise!

Piracy has always been a problem, and it always will be. From taping to burning cd’s, to buying DVD’s from the Triads on the London Underground. It’s easier now maybe, but I’m not losing any sleep over it. The de-valuation of music or any intellectual property is not the fault of technology but a fault of mindset. I think the answer is to make everything affordable, somehow. It is part of a much larger social and political question.

The new ways to monetize music are really only significant in that it is possible to have Direct to Consumer income streams, potentially cutting out middle men. Whether that is wise or not is questionable. Regardless, it has yet to prove significant in relation to the business we do with the likes of Amazon or iTunes who dominate the ‘pathways’ to the product.

How internet and the new media had changed your way of running a label? How do you use it on a day to day basis?
Not much, because the label is only 4 years old, and everything was started with internet already important. Emails and Myspace was always our primary way of communication. But there is nothing more beneficial than meeting or speaking with people, especially if you are nice. If you are socially inept, grumpy, or just generally an idiot, please don’t go to Popkomm.

New media and its growth and change has meant that I have had to turn to people who grew up amidst the blogospheres, employing younger guys to inform me and keep track of trends and movements, so that we do not get left behind.

How much money could you save by using more digital in your day to day operations ? Is it also important for you to use digital services to have a smaller impact on the ecology of the planet?
The Internet and digital world is a wonderful thing, because it is environmentally friendly. Less need for all that paper etc etc etc etc. . I welcome it and endorse it wholeheartedly. I’m glad it is the future. We can’t keep consuming materials. It is a hypocrisy of mine that I still cannot shake off vinyl. When I listen to a vinyl record, it is a ritual, and a very involved personal experience. And it does sound more ‘real’ to me.

As for saving money, well, it surely can and does, but in terms of the economy, ownership of technology will mean that the black hole is filled in with charges every step of the way. There’s nothing really wrong with that if it is needed to prop up the economy of it all, as long as it is not a monopoly.

I cannot believe that Skype is free still! Yet they just sold the company for millions. I am clearly missing something! This is why I am not rich.

Your records are available on physical and digital formats: do you think there’s still a place for both? Do you have an idea of the percentage of the physical toward the digital?
Yes there is a place for both. The % of digital to physical varies from artist to artist and country to country, but we have not had a single artist who sells more digital than physical. Humans are naturally materialistic and so we feel the need to “own” something that we want. If someone only half-wants some music then they will probably download illegally, or burn a cd. Just like we used to tape records. Seasick Steve is an example of an artist who appeals to a cross-section of society, with a huge older audience. The older audience still buy records and so vastly outweigh the digital ( 95% is physical sales). If digital take-over is partly a generational thing, partly a geo-political thing, and partly a educational thing, then it will be 25 (exactly 25) years before the revolution is complete.

Are you doing digital only releases?
Not yet!

How do you keep contact with your fans? Through your site, community sites…?
We send out monthly Fanclub letters in the post with pictures of the bands, button badges, patches, and a newsletter, all for a monthly subscription fee of £1.50.

Just kidding. But hey, I think that would be the best way to get a better success rate of readership, although very expensive. If you get something in the post, you are more likely to open it.

We are still working out how best to keep contact. But we use the usual online channels of Facebook and Myspace, and we do email mailouts to a growing mailing list. We are, in the scheme of things, not the best at having contact with the fans of our artists. Our artists do it better, because it’s more fun for them than it is for us.

On a personal level you are also a manager: which tools are you using?
If I understand the question correctly, the tools that I use to manage an artist on a personal level are essentially social skills. The ability to be trusted, understood and/liked without jeopardizing beliefs and visions, and not being too hard or too soft, and being able to roll with the punches, bend with the curveballs: it’s an emotional rollercoaster! The music industry is, quite frankly, riddled with cunts. Management is meant to protect the artist from cunts, but often the manager is a cunt, and often the artist is an even bigger cunt. I suppose the world is just one big cunt-dispenser.

(Sorry, I’ve just been to Midem…)

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