It’s somewhat impossible to speak about Your EDM’s online presence without mentioning Rukes in the same sentence. As one of the most prolific event photographers in dance music, his photos has graced the cover of innumerable articles on our site — I personally have over 2,000 of his photos saved to my hard drive.
This holiday season, Rukes — real name Drew Ressler — is giving back to all of his fans with a special Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale, beginning tomorrow through Monday. Read below to find out what he’s been up to during COVID, and how to take advantage of this fantastic deal!
How have you been these past eight months? What have you been up to, how have you supported yourself, what do you miss the most?
I have mostly been taking it easy. With a combination of pandemic relief and having time to sell old stuff on eBay, I was able to pad my savings quite a bit so I can thankfully hang in there until things get back to normal.
I miss pretty much everything. I miss travelling most of all; flying internationally was always my favorite thing to do. Going to be a bit difficult to see how cruise festivals might ever come back, and those were always uniquely fun.
You recently began offering prints of your photos, something you hadn’t offered before. What drove you to finally take the plunge?
I did offer some poster prints of Deadmau5 many years ago, but back then it was just mostly for fun. I sold the poster prints for almost nothing, and they didn’t make enough to make sense continuing to sell them.
I decided to use my free time to set up a proper prints store, and actually have lots of high-quality pictures and prints, since most people are just one-time buyers. Let people get something that lasts awhile or makes a quality gift, compared to a basic poster print. There isn’t really any other place online that sells high-quality DJ prints in the world; I even tried to partner with more rock/pop oriented print sites and they weren’t very receptive.
What is the process for what artists you put on the prints site?
For starters, since I own the copyright to a majority of my photos, I can go with US Copyright law which lets me sell any print I want as fine art, as long as it’s numbered up to 200 and signed. That is something I do eventually plan on doing on my site with certain artists that I can’t work something out with.
In the meantime, I am discussing approval to just produce prints on-demand without singing or numbering them, which is a lot easier. Every artist you see on the site so far graciously have given their approval in a mutually beneficial way, so everyone is happy. I thought I would hit tons of roadblocks, but for the most part people have been very receptive.
I actually still have a list of artists I’m working out approval with, it’s just that with the lack of gigs, some managements are kind of in “out of office” mode so anything work related is pushed back a bit. It’s taking a lot longer than if I just discuss it at a festival or during work. My current plan is to still release one new artist once a month!
We hear that you have something in store for fans this Thanksgiving, can you tell us a little more about it?
I’m doing a huge Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale, using code THANKS2020 for 30% off anything on my site, from Thursday through Monday!
If you miss this sale, subscribe to my mailing list on rukes.com, you will get notified when a new artist drops along with any sales that happen.
Photo via Rukes.com
