Ronnie Winter of The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus stops by Inside Music to celebrate our podcasting milestone and share updates from COVID-19 lockdown.
Making a living in alternative music is a difficult task. Reaching the point of profitability and continuing to excel for five years is almost impossible. Continuing to grow and build an audience for nearly two decades is a feat so insurmountable most artists never come close to achieving it. Still, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus is not most artists. The band learned early on that fans are as much as a factor in success as their songwriting, and they harnessed that understanding to establish themselves as one of the most widely-recognized names in rock worldwide.
Vocalist and founding member Ronnie Winter will be the first to tell you that hard work and fan engagement alone is not enough to produce a successful career in music. Luck also plays a much more significant role in success stories than many people are willing to admit. For every artist that gets ahead by engaging with fans and writing good songs, hundreds more utilizing the same techniques and never go anywhere. That is because most musicians are only as good as their fans, and how listeners react to music is what ultimately determines an artist’s fate. People can love a song, but do they like it enough to tell people about it? Do they align themselves with the group or artist so much that they feel intimately involved in that person’s career trajectory? These things matter just as much, if not more than having talent.
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus treat fans as if they are members of the band. The group dedicates a large amount of time to reading and replying to messages, as well as interacting with followers through live events online. That devotion to their audience has produced a global following that is willing to go above and beyond to ensure RJA continues to create and deliver songs that matter, and no amount of marketing money or label involvement can duplicate that kind of artist-fan relationship.
To celebrate 200 episodes of INSIDE MUSIC, host James Shotwell shares a video chat with Red Jumpsuit Apparatus frontman Ron Winters. Ron tells James about his band’s enduring legacy in alternative rock, his work to engage with fans during COVID, and how the group’s recent single (“Brace Yourself“) became an unexpected quarantine anthem.
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus will release their highly anticipated new EP, Emergency, later this year.
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