Francoise: We do everything right now.

Mathieu Drouin: Well, Fuzz and I –

Francoise: It’s not cut and dry ‘cause not enough people to actually compartmentalize everything and have everyone do one thing, one specific thing. So we do everything from mailing out the promotional records to making the deals.

Mathieu Drouin: But infrastructure wise, we have direct board approval at FACTOR which is the Foundation to Assist Canadian Talent on Record. Which is guaranteed financing for up to four unreleased projects at any time. So from a financial recourse standpoint, that’s huge. It’s the ability to generate up to $1 million a year on grants and loans, guaranteed if you ask and your project qualifies, the potential to generate more.

We have distribution through EMI in Canada, which is one of the four major labels. We have distribution through Caroline, which is a division of EMI in the US that we picked because we’re dealing mostly with independent artists in the context of Equator and it made more sense to go through a label like that. One who understands the projects and can do organic development than to go through EMI Proper, which was a choice that we had.

Fuzz and I work in the project fulltime. We have Mark and another girl called Samantha Lee who are working with us. We have a bookkeeper who comes to the office two days a week and works from home the rest of the time. And then we have my brother who’s a retired investment banker, who helps to structure a lot of the things from a financial standpoint. Because we’re also setting up – I mean we have worldwide deals with iTunes. We deal with an aggregator who takes care of all of the other online distribution channels for us.

So we’ve subcontracted out a lot of the work. Which also makes sense for us from a financial standpoint because just because of the way the grant system works in Canada. If we hire somebody to do publicity or to do radio promotion in-house, then we cannot raise funds to help cover those costs. But if they’re a third-party contractor then we can. And we can basically take their bill and submit it to the grant agencies and get a portion of that paid back.

Again, when you’re a Canadian owned company, with a history of success, dealing with Canadian artists. It’s not like anybody can come in and set that up. But for our particular situation that makes sense.

And we looked at three publicity companies for Islands in the US: Biz 3, Big Hassle, and Tag Team. Big Hassle and Biz 3 are both in New York. Sorry. Yeah, Big Hassle and Tag Team are both in New York; Biz 3’s in Chicago. Which isn’t essentially the most centrally located place. I didn’t really know the company. They dealt with Death from Above which is an artist that we worked with putting it out on Last Gang, which was that label we talked to you about before. And other than that, didn’t really know much about them. But they were gung-ho.

We sent the music to all three of them. They were all very interested. But this, Catherine Frazier, who runs this company, was calling us twice a week and was saying, “I love the project. Here’s what I would I do. Here’s a 13-page press plan of who I’m gonna go after.” And so it allows us to really take on the big motivated people to work on the project, which I think serves the projects well.

We’re also right now talking with a number of different parties to provide infrastructure support if we needed it. Actually, ironically, once we announced our resignation from DKD, which is the Donald K Donald Group. It’s one of Canada’s largest independent music companies: nine record labels, a studio, publicity company, radio promotion, three event business working with concerts, government events, and corporate events, the Canadian Music Network, Canadian Entertainment Network which are the industry trade resources or trade magazines. The company has pretty much a complete scope of everything in terms of its vertical integration in the independent music industry in Canada.

And when we decided we were gonna set that aside which is obviously a big a decision: to forgo a pretty big salary and a prestigious “industry position” that comes with leverage and clout, to buy a house and forgo any form of salary and sink all your money into the always safe investment that is an independent music company. I thought people were gonna think we were crazy.

Francoise: True.

Mathieu Drouin: And some people did.

Francoise: Some did.

Mathieu Drouin: But a lot of people came out of the woodwork with interest in investing in the company. We have a little bit of money from what we did before and from a past life and we’re financing this ourselves. Things are going really well. The government funding helps. The support and belief of our distributors who’ve given us relatively significant advances is allowing us to build this completely in our own image, for the moment and finance it ourselves. And we can handle all the infrastructure needs that we have for the moment.

We have four artists that we’re working with, maybe another. And our plate is full with that but completely manageable. And when it gets to the point where we need to have more infrastructure and more support we have a variety of options that we can look at right now to determine who’s the best partner.

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