A short YouTube clip (James Hype) recounting his collaboration with DJ/producer Vintage Culture during COVID. He sent stems, experienced long delays while Vintage Culture reworked the track (new drums and structure), initially disliked the changes, and ultimately compromised by adjusting the structure and producing a radio edit. The clip highlights follow-up persistence, artistic compromise in collaborations, and the production outcome.
This is a lesson in following up. No one gets offended when you follow up, but everyone's scared to do it. I sent it to Vintage Culture because it was during COVID We were talking a bit because we were both doing lots of, like, YouTube videos. And I think we both had this mutual respect for one another. And he was like, yeah, I love it. Let's collab on it. And I sent him all the stems and then he disappeared for a year. Then I chased him up and I was like, are we still doing it? And he was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Disappeared again. And then I chased him again three months later or something. And yeah, the third time I went back to him, he was like, okay, cool. He did some work on it. He really transformed the record. He did all the drums on it and kind of made a different structure to it as well. When he sent me, I hated it. The hard thing with collaboration is collaboration is compromise. And when you're an artist, compromise is horrible. You don't want to do compromise. As soon as someone else works on your record, you're not going to like it as much as you did before. You've got to, like, take a step back and see it through the bigger perspective. This is someone who's really successful, and this is what he thinks it should sound like. You're not always right. He sent me his version back. I think I changed the structure and made a radio edit and that was it.
