by Moshe Isaacian
V-Moda has quickly become a staple in the electronic music industry for providing affordable yet high fidelity products for fans and producers, and today they are taking the company to the next level. To celebrate 808 today, V-Moda has announced a new partnership with Roland Corporation, one of the leading manufacturers and distributors of electronic music instruments for over 40 years.
Here is what V-Moda’s CEO Val Kolton had to say on what the merger means for the future of company:
“For more than a decade, we have vigorously crafted high-end personal audio products for modern audiophiles that reproduce music for a concert and club-like experience. This partnership is not strictly a business deal; it’s a strategic synergy that will bridge the high-quality sound, materials and design of our products with the legendary genre-changing sound expertise and commitment to excellence from Roland. Roland’s 808, 909, the contribution to the development of MIDI protocol and countless products helped to lay the foundation and forge today’s music, and together we can carry on the tradition.”
As this is an exciting day for Val, we took the opportunity to learn more about his relationship with V-Moda and the electronic dance music scene, seeing how the headphones have become a product of choice for many notable players in the industry today. Here’s what he had to say.
What was the biggest challenge for you to get V-Moda up and running? What inspired to keep going against all odds?
Throughout the years, you know, V-Moda has had a lot of its successes but it’s been a tough journey to grow as a family-grown company. As an entrepreneur, I didn’t realize that when you are in manufacturing there is a lot of lessons learned to be learned, whether needing a lot of cash to support inventory, understanding operations of your people, marketing the products and get the word out there, or eve all the R&D costs associated with getting hardware together.
Hardware development is a tough business, but we’ve preserved as a family-grown company and organically grow, and we did this by sticking to our values of high quality and listening to our customers and making sure our KPIs were set around getting as many DJs as possibly to use our products without paying them. Now we have the top 40% of Djs use V-Moda and we’re the number #1 ranked brand on Amazon based on thousand customer reviews and we’ve won over 35 editor choice awards on our last 2 products alone. It’s exciting to see how sticking through the thick and thin and focusing on quality and our long-term vision has helped us really preserve
Are there a couple of artists that you are particularly fond of? What about genres?
(Laughs) I’m starting to feel a little older, but from the young guys – Martin Garrix and Avicii I constantly keep in touch with, Nervo are good friends of mine, and there are a lot of the legends like Paul Oakenfold, Sander Kleinenberg, Erik Morillo, Funkagenda, Dirty Vegas. I was on tour and played a lot – I was a resident DJ in LA for quite some years, and I was able to meet a lot of friends and become close with Tiesto even. It’s been a journey of EDM and meet everyone and go on tour with them
I still keep up to date with a lot of genres today and I’ve been listening to a lot of deep house and Techno 2.0 that’s making a comeback. I also love a lot of underground dance music in general and some of the newer guys like Solomun and so forth. Still really into the scene and I’m always downloading new sets every day.
V-Moda has been around for quite some time. How do you see V-Moda evolving beyond a company for musicians and professionals?
One of the things I came up with the formation of the [Roland] partnership is where I feel headphones is an icon where technology and music collide. For example, there’s a lot of brands that are based off horsemanship – Polo, Gucci etc, so I see the headphone becoming an icon for the generation of music lovers to encapsulate all that love together.
The headphone at the moment is used as a playback device – playback as a creation and performance aspect. Consumers primarily use it for playback,people in the studio use it for creation, and DJs rely on it for live performances. To grow on what the headphone can do – create, perform, and play – is the next thing V-Moda plans to achieve with Roland, where we can to really get into the game of making a variety of music instruments and equipment for DJss and producers in general – from pianos, drums, keyboards, synthesizers, modulars, jump sequencers, guitar products, professional mixers, and more.
How did you decide on Roland as a partner and could you explain how they fit into the broader vision of what you’re trying to achieve
Well, we can’t reveal too much except that we have been developing our first Bluetooth speaker that follows in the same vein of this partnership, which will allow us to come out with more product categories. Whether it’s an extension of the speaker line or not, V-Moda and I have attention to detail and we don’t want to come out with too many products, yet we still want to have the same DNA of customization and attention of detail we maintain which music lovers, audiophiles, DJs, and even gamers will enjoy. Each of our products will have 2-3 new patents to raise the bar and differentiate us from “carbon copy” crowd – it seems like a lot of people are copying each other nowadays and we want to avoid that.
Lastly, what three v-Moda products would you recommend for an electronic music fan who want to become an audiophile?
Hands down it’s pretty easy. If you want extreme portability, you can go with our On-Ear XS model, which is really nice because it folds up really small and you actually put into a jacket pocket. From an over ear product, it’s a toss up – if you’re a hardcore DJ, go with the Crossfit M-100’s which has an analog mode. I also recommend the Crossfit Wireless which has gotten amazing reviews and is our best-wired headphone in terms of sound quality. It also has a Bluetooth and wireless mode….funny thing is, I wasn’t going to build one but I ate my words (laughs) and now l listen wireless 95% of the time now.
Leave a Reply