Produced with love: Joey Negro is riding the recent disco revival

What’s the worst thing about the internet?

File sharing. For every one track you sell how many get downloaded for free? Ten? Thirty? I don’t know.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen as a producer since when you started out?

The big change for me is that twenty years ago we had Unit Three Studios and we’d have to find three grand a month rent. We were reliant to a degree in getting outside work to pay the rent. But the days of getting eight grand for a remix are long gone. Nowadays people are doing remixes for a lot less than that. Also, there’s a lot less money in releasing music – even if you put out a fairly popular track. How much money would you make out of it now? Three grand, maybe? There’s not much compilation album money because there are far fewer compilations coming out. There are plenty of positives, too, but the income from producing is a lot less than it was. Now I have a studio in my house and I mainly work for my own label and I like being my own A&R man. All I need to ask now is ‘do I like it?’

You’ve been producing for nearly 30 years. Why have you outlasted your competitors?

I don’t know. Some people just seem to give up after they’ve had a bit of success. Invariably, for everybody, it will at some stage go downhill. You have that golden period for six months when everyone wants to write about you, but that ends and it becomes a bit of a grind. If you’re a trained lawyer or you have other qualifications, then maybe you decide that now is the time to go into another career. I had a period in 1991 and 1992 where I had quite a lot of success in a short period and it dipped down, and people were no longer excited by what I was doing. But then you just have to keep banging away until you create something that they are excited about. I always ask myself: ‘would I buy this? Do I actually like it? Is it any point in this record existing?’