Bettina Richards of Thrill Jockey Records

With a roster that’s home to Tortoise, The Fiery Furnaces, ADULT., and a number of other bands that newer artists are often compared to, Thrill Jockey label head—and former Atlantic Records employee—Bettina Richards has been releasing diverse and influential music for the past 15 years both here in Chicago and in the label’s original home base of New York City. Rather than trying to find a specific sound for everything on her label, Richards releases records with the enthusiasm of an indie-music geek cherry-picking her favorites for a road-trip mix-tape—or 10. The A.V. Club spoke to Richards before Thrill Jockey’s pair of shows celebrating its 15th anniversary.

AVC: Why did you leave Atlantic Records?

Bettina Richards: I wasn’t really happy in those environments. In short, I didn’t like the artist-to-label relationship; I didn’t like the inflexibility of the large corporation. They’re responsible to shareholders, but at Thrill Jockey we’re responsible to our bands. That’s a huge difference. We’re a 50-percent profit share; we have only single-album agreements. I really admired Dischord and Touch & Go, so I had their pretty excellent models to follow.

AVC: Those labels laid the blueprint, but how did you deviate from it?

BR: Our single-album thing is a little more extreme than theirs. I really wanted to put out records the way I listen to records, which is all different kinds of music all over the place. Lots of people gave me lectures about “branding” and what a good idea it is to have a “sound.” That’s not how I listen to records; that’s not how I get excited about music. We just wanted to do what we wanted to do. Another Chicago label similar in that regard is Drag City.

AVC: What prompted the move to Chicago?

BR: A lot of the artists I was working with were from here. I really wanted to be distributed by Touch & Go at that point. I was having less time to work my other jobs, because the label was taking up all my time. It was very hard to make rent in New York, and it was hard to ship records out of a fifth-floor walk-up apartment.

AVC: Is there a specific date you consider to be Thrill Jockey’s actual birthday, or is it just 1992?

BR: It was late June in 1992.

AVC: What was your first release?

BR: H.P. Zinker! Perseverance. For the real trivia buffs out there, that same band was also OLE 001 on Matador. It’s still in print on vinyl; the CD is no longer in print.

AVC: Obviously there are going to be differences between your major-label job and running Thrill Jockey, but what are some of the music-business changes you’ve noticed over the course of 15 years at the level that Thrill Jockey operates at?

BR: There have been a lot of significant changes. When we started the label, we communicated with people by fax. Now, the idea of making 200 8-by-10-inch black-and-whites to send out on tour—we’ll just send a link to 300-dpi downloads! Going from zines to blogs as a way to access music—it’s vastly, vastly different. Obviously the well-known conversation about the effect that buying music electronically has had on the essential independent record store. Because we depend on them, you have to really adapt. You have to be willing to adapt to changes.

AVC: Have any of these changes caught you off guard?

BR: You can see changes happening, but the change in ratio of income from downloads versus CDs happened so rapidly, there was some shock in terms of pressing quantities of CDs, where I had a pretty tried-and-true formula that had worked for about 12 years that I no longer use. [Laughs.]

AVC: Could you see the number of physical CDs dropping much lower than what you’re currently selling?

BR: People said that about LPs. “They’re dead, they’re dead!” We never stopped making them. Now, they’re raging. Vinyl has always been my favorite format, so I’m so happy to see it doing well. We provide a coupon for a free download of the album if you buy the vinyl. You can have it in the lovely sit-it-on-your-lap-and-stare-at-the-artwork version, and listen to the fine, warm sounds. Or, you can have the I-want-to-be-on-the-El-train-with-my-record version. We’re looking at making our CDs similar to what vinyl is for people that are interested in that format. Making the packages really fancy—we’re trying to do more and more things that are very deluxe, very reasonably priced, and limited-edition. It’s a great deal, it’s low-risk for the store, and the fan that gets it really wins. The Tortoise box set was one of the bigger things we did that way. It was three CDs and a DVD in a really nice box, and we sold it dirt-cheap. I think it sold out in five weeks. It worked for the stores; it worked for us.

AVC: After this 15th-anniversary celebration is over, do you see Thrill Jockey continuing on in some form or another?

BR: It’s hard to say I do, but it’s also really hard to imagine myself doing something else. So for lack of something better to do, I’ll probably still be doing it. I’m a hopeless music fan, I’m a record geek, I love going to shows. It’s a lot of hard work, I’m not going to diminish that, but there are so many paydays that come with it that don’t have to do with money.