Rather than maintain in-house designers, lawyers and staff year-round, he keeps them on retainer. Instead of an opulent office he’d hardly visit, he works from home. Ritter keeps his operations simple to avoid unneeded overhead. “I don’t want to squeeze these guys dry, I want to be able to work with them for the rest of my life.” With that bridge in the mending process, along with collaborations and sponsorships, “ are all in pretty good situations.” Ritter revealed how he distributes earnings, which are dynamically split: “You start at a certain percentage-label-to-artist-and as they turn in more albums, it gets better in their favor.” Hopsin, also co-owner of Funk, taps more revenue streams than anyone else at the label. The label suffered a rare misstep when it failed to appropriately register its publishing, losing untold amounts in undelivered royalties. Merchandise and touring join music sales as the big three income sources for Funk Volume, though Ritter says the central pot varies for each artist-music accounts for the lion’s share of Hopsin’s revenue. “ If we can recoup half of the cost or all of the cost of making the album with just the hardcopy that means all the digital is profit.” That’s a valid argument.” Ritter fondly remembers going to the store and buying DMX’s classic record, "It’s Dark and Hell is Hot", though he admits “that was super long ago.” But on the flip side it’s also promotion and people that may have never heard your music will give it a try. I’m not a huge fan of streaming because it doesn’t compensate the artist well. “Even if you just have CDs as collectors’ items, it’s worth making some. “If we can recoup half of the cost or all of the cost of making the album with just the hardcopy that means all the digital is profit,” Ritter says, before addressing streams. For an independent, those numbers represent a significant windfall that enables expansion. Each artist on the label will sell at least 1000 hard copies, pre-sale, with flagship rapper Hopsin selling between three and 5000 before the release date. Loyalty allows Funk Volume to defy industry sales trends, finding even physical sales fruitful. You can’t be there for everyone.” Though delicate situations forced him to scale back fan interaction, listener participation continues to drive the label’s success. It’s tough because you really just have to understand that you can’t please everyone. “I’ve had people that wanted to commit suicide reach out to me, and I don’t know them at all. Some call it direct-to-fan marketing, but Ritter prefers to view Funk Volume’s outreach as a genuine effort with real people, exchanging stories and, occasionally, all-too-real problems. It definitely wasn’t created overnight, it’s something we’ve been working at for six years now.” That’s what creates that type of fan base.
They’ve kind of gotten to know us on a different level outside of just the music. Just sharing that journey with people, with our fans that we’ve picked up along the way, is special. We used to do this thing called FVTV on Ustream, where SwizZz would freestyle while people threw out words to him. Hop’ would Skype call people, and he still does that a ton.
We would have our annual contest, online conferences. “We’re online, and you probably can’t see it as much now, but when we were coming up we would respond to pretty much everybody,” Ritter says. As artists and industry types obsessed over blogs, Ritter organically built a buzz blogs couldn’t ignore. But in a time that saw the inception of Facebook struggle spam, he and his team of acts treated each possible supporter with nurturing care, building another familial bond, expanding their house of influence one individual at a time. It’s not that tricky of an industry, it’s pretty straightforward.” With business models morphing like mutated Transformers and a dizzying, criss-cross network of revenue streams and record companies, “straightforward” might appear arrogant, if not ignorant. “So if we just focus on building a fan base then we can figure everything else out later. “To me it was really just about the fans,” he affirms. Rather than study the early work of Funk’s predecessors - Tommy Boy, Bad Boy, Profile and Def Jam - Damien focused on what he believed to be the key for growth - fans. “ We didn’t know how big it would get, but they did know they didn’t want me intervening in the creative process.”
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