DJ Ron: I guess that's also part of the reasons it’s lasted so long. It’s a testament to you, and congratulations for the great success over such a long period for Ovum. What do you think is the secret to the long-term success of Ovum?
Josh Wink: Well, I think first and foremost, it’s integrity. We’ve really kept our integrity and not necessarily gone to what has been the in thing at the moment, the most popular thing. Oh, progressive’s big now, so let’s go into progressive. Oh, trance is big now, let’s go into trance. We’ve kept the same mentality of being diverse and not really gone for the hits and what's popular. As soon as you have that, you have an expectation of always releasing that kind of music and you lose your original fan base, I think. Even though you gain people, I believe it’s a ‘quick in and quick out’ mentality. So I think our integrity to keeping this vision that we had of diverse specialized music paramount in our visions has basically kept us going. We are fortunate that DJs and producers from all over the world are still sending us demos and they want to be affiliated with Ovum in some manner and have their music released on our label. People also know the fact that my partner Matt and I are good people to work with, where I’m an artist and I’m releasing my music only on my label and a lot of people like that. They know that we’re personal people and that it’s very, very difficult to make a living in the music industry right now, but for us it’s a labor of love and the money’s not flowing in but our love is flowing in.
DJ Ron: That's cool. Well let me ask you, what's a lesson that you learned with your time with Sony?
Josh Wink: Well first of all that it wasn’t the right marriage for us, but we also learned so many interesting things about how popular music channels through such a big mega company. They have a lot of great people working at the company and we’ve learned a lot of things about how promotion, street teams and marketing works. We learned about videos, the politics of radio, advertising and everything, the stuff that we couldn’t get near the giant until we got in with the giant. It wasn’t right for us but we were with the company for four years and we learned a lot of really cool things and we were able to get our catalogue back so we don’t have any hard feelings. We’re just happy to move to a different level right now. What we really realized was that dealing with the major label, even though there's a lot of cool people there that wanted to share our vision and do something with a small indie entity like ourselves, if we don’t look or sell like Ricky Martin or Will Smith or The Fugees, you can easily get lost.
DJ Ron: Well, speaking of labels, you're now with a great company called System who, personally, I think are among the best out there. How did you hook-up with System and what are you gaining from that relationship?
Josh Wink: I don’t know actually. I think they approached us or they worked with some people like Nigel Richards and we were looking for someone to distribute our CDs. We recognized from Lou and Eric their passion that we also shared and the fact that we’re going after an equal goal, to make a living but also release quality music in a responsible fashion as an independent. We liked that, so we structured a production and distribution deal where we were going at it to get the same thing. I’m not so much involved as much as my partner Matt as I’ve really been on the road a lot trying to make a living on the road to fund the label.
