Mathieu Drouin: That’s a difficult question to answer because – let me start with an analogy. I mean I think the future of the music is not going to be about, in five, ten, fifteen years about physical product, necessarily. Not nearly as much as it is today.

And I think that that’s gonna lower the barriers of entry coming into the industry. It’s gonna mitigate the stronghold that the major labels have on the industry at the moment. The whole technological landscape is changing and that’s changing things.

I’m getting off on a tangent and I’m not gonna go that far.

All to say though that basically in today’s world, 90-percent of the money that you’re gonna make you’re still gonna make, as a record label, from the sale of physical product in stores. So you can’t ignore that revenue center and say I’m just gonna be a digital label. But at the same time you have recognize, or at least it’s my and our feeling that it’s not a question of physical product model in decline that’s going to morph into something else.

Over time, and probably a long period of time, the sale of physical product as representing 90 percent of the sales in the industry of recorded music is gonna decline. And digital music and online sales are gonna start to become more and more important. Whether it’s mobile, electronic transmission let’s say. So with that in mind, you have to recognize the current reality of the situation and respect that and work within that framework with the view to ultimately setting the stage for the future.

So from a deal standpoint it’s the same thing. I’m not going to, for example there’s another artist we work with called Islands. They were formally the Unicorns. I think you may have interviewed them in the context of this project. Well, those guys sold 60 thousand records of the Unicorns in a short period of time with no support. They’re one of the first bands out of Montreal. They broke up actually ‘cause one of the members didn’t want to be famous and they were starting to get too famous. But when these guys put another record together and they financed it themselves and they came to us and they said, “We’d really like you to put this out but we want to license the record to you.”

And, although right now we’re talking about management and doing a lot of management work, at the very least, in the context of our relationship, it was they’re not interested in a publisher. They want to own their own copyright. They already own the master; they paid for it. And they could license the project for way more money than they licensed it to us for to a number of separate parties.

So we’re not gonna say we’re not willing to do a deal if it’s a practical – if it’s a deal with an artist that can build the label and will attract other talent and financially we can make money on that type of a deal, we’re not gonna turn it down just because it’s not at all in model. But at the same time, that’s definitely what we believe to be the future. Or at least a future that we’re gonna try and build something around.

And so our opening, I mean if we’re dealing with an artist that has no history, that’s band new, that’s starting fresh, that’s definitely the approach that we’re gonna take. And we’re gonna be more inflexible with the concept of that being our business model. Not to say that it’s the business model or that everybody has to do it or it’s the best one, or it’s the right one, but it’s the one that we’re trying to build something around.

So an artist, respect if they don’t wanna deal with that or that’s not the model they wanna try, they don’t believe in it. But if we’re dealing with a brand new artist that’s what we’re going for, for the most part, if we’re going to be building it from scratch. But that doesn’t preclude us from doing just a publishing deal or just a management deal.

I mean Metric is an artist we co-manage with another guy called Chris Taylor. That’s just a management deal. Although they’re signed to a record company that, as the president of DKD—Chris Taylor, who’s a lawyer from Toronto, and I started Last Gang Records—as a joint venture between his management company and DKD. And Metric has signed to them. They have a publishing deal with Chrysalis and our deal is only a management deal. With The Lovely Feathers it’s recording, management and publishing. With Islands it’s just records.

Francoise: Just records.

Mathieu Drouin: So we can’t afford to make it cut and dry. And it’s all a work in progress.

[End of Audio]