Today we’d like to introduce you to Collar John David Ricker.
Collar, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in Coronado and existed what I refer to as the fringes. Coronado’s a very weird place to grow as a person. I gravitated towards very few amount of people and my family was not very plugged into the community in terms of people, which I sort of look back and am grateful for. My few friends always had a common theme of music (and also being good-hearted humans). I fell into a weird world of turn of the century New York hip-hop, and that’s what bred my music taste for the most part… besides like Slightly Stoopid and Sublime since we’re repping SD here — I did have a P.O.D. CD as well… People who I could listen to Pharcyde or Hieroglyphics or Company flow with are people that are still in my life today, practicing the art and business of music and living.
I went to Tucson for college, the University of Arizona. I met a group of cats my second year at a house from a classmate from Coronado High School. My music past met with others who had birthed a passion for engineering and recording music and making content. That was the infant stage of Adobe House, an outlet for us to make music, put it out, and have content surrounding it. At that time it was just Adobe House Records. We made somewhat of a wave in Tucson, but we weren’t bred or staying there.
We ended up having a headquarters in Los Angeles, all living together or going there for shows and business. We threw events in our backyard, having an amazing space for Los Angeles especially. We were going hard basically every week for a year until we ran into some heat. We’re now pivoting into using venues instead of our own Adobe House Venue.
Which is today. The vision is threefold for an overall Adobe House media company: music, events, online content. Record label shows podcasts as of now. None of us are living off of music money and have jobs in other fields that pay are living expenses. This transition period is one of envisioning a business model of those three main niches that we can expand and grow into what I’m envisioning for the company. Up until this point, we were somewhat of a boutique for an analogy, and we have to find buildings and systems where we can scale.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Adobe House is the people inside. What makes us different, especially on the music front, is that we’re all so vastly different than each other. Everyone is their person. Living with 8 other people is not an easy thing, especially when we all have vague ideas of what we’re trying to build for ourselves and collectively. Some people that were with us in the beginning or not with us now… some people that are with us now might not be for very long. The individual versus the collective is a hard balance, especially when we still have to imprint what this business is going to be and how it’s going to work.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
The three branches of Adobe House are music, live events, and online content. We’ve been developing artists, recording in our studio, engineering with our staff in-house since 2016. Everything that is attached to Adobe House music is made by those in Adobe House. Our live events have existed even in Tucson where we had “Rap Camp” in our dwelling. That evolved into “Soapy Lawn” events in Los Angeles. Which is now evolving into “Adobe House Presents” events.
Also in Tucson, we started podcasts. That has existed to now in the first show, “Dark Racial Humor.” We plan to expand to a network of podcasts as well as a platform for mentoring and informing about the podcast business.
What were you like growing up?
I said it in the first somewhat, quite introverted. I didn’t hang out with a lot of people. I didn’t skate or surf, but I loved those words and their content. Always had earbuds in. I was a video game addict, shout out Call of Duty. I was a thinker. Maybe more in my head than I should have been… the earbuds help with that. Once I got a Machine drum machine from Native Instruments, it was all the work of music from there. Business came along as the years went by, and it’s emerging to a greater form now. One parent household with one sister. My father died of cancer when I was one so I never met him physically.
Pricing:
- Collar John Type Beat: $200 lease, exclusive prices and terms: http:/adobehouse.live/contact
- Podcast services: $300 for a month of recordings
- Shows, engineering, & recording reach out to http://adobehouse.live/contact
Contact Info:
- Website: adobehouse.live
- Phone: 6197333146
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adobehouserecords/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdobeHouseRecords/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/adobehousemusic
- Other: http://google.com/search?q=adobe+house+records
Image Credit:
John Ricker
Matthew Arietta
Jonathan Benn
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