Real People. Virtual Faces
- Jinko
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
What happens when the people running a record label don’t look like the people you’d expect to be running a record label?
Meet Bunnie and Jinko.
They’re the two public faces behind Distraction Media, Distraction Records and Distraction Radio. They host shows, introduce artists, appear across our social media and inhabit the little world we’re building around Distraction.
They’re also us. Bunnie and Jinko are our virtual identities.
There are real people behind them, running a real business. We work with artists, manage releases, produce and master music, create campaigns, run a weekly radio show and somehow keep a growing international community moving in roughly the same direction.
We could put photographs of ourselves at the top of all of that.
We could dress a little smarter, stand in front of a mixing desk and make Distraction look like every other independent music company. But that wouldn’t really be Distraction.
Meet Black Bunnie
Bunnie is the creative and technical force behind Distraction. From music production and mastering to radio, artist development and the technology keeping everything running, she brings together the sound and systems behind what we do. Usually with considerably more chaos than this description suggests.
Meet Jinko
Jinko is the design and direction behind Distraction. Working across brand, strategy, artist development, radio and the ever-growing world around it, he spends most of his time turning slightly ridiculous ideas into real things. Occasionally even intentionally.
Our virtual identities weren’t created as mascots for the business. They grew alongside it.
As Distraction became more than a community, Bunnie and Jinko became more than avatars. They became a way for us to be present within the world we were creating, without separating the people behind the business from the personality of the business itself.
And somewhere along the way, we realised there was something much more important in that.
We work with artists who use virtual identities too.
Behind those identities are real people.
People making music about their lives. About love, loss, pain, trauma, anger, identity, loneliness, recovery and things they might never feel comfortable saying out loud.
Creating music can be incredibly personal. Putting your real name, face, workplace, family and everyday life alongside that music isn’t something every artist can do.
And more importantly, it isn’t something every artist should feel they have to do.
There’s still a tendency to talk about virtual identities as though somebody is “hiding behind” them. We don’t see it that way.
Sometimes an identity isn’t somewhere to hide. It’s a shield.
It gives an artist control over how much of themselves they give to the world.
It can create enough distance between the person and the work for them to say things they otherwise couldn’t say.
The emotion doesn’t become less real because the face representing it is virtual.
The story doesn’t become less important.
The person behind it doesn’t become less human.
And we think the music industry needs to become much more comfortable with that.
That’s one of the reasons we’re happy for Bunnie and Jinko to stand at the front of Distraction.
If we’re going to tell artists that it’s okay to choose an identity that makes them feel comfortable, safe and able to create freely, then we’re not afraid to stand there with them.
We’re not asking anybody to step out from behind something that might be giving them the confidence to step forward in the first place.
Professional doesn’t have to mean conventional. Authentic doesn’t have to mean exposed. And privacy doesn’t mean somebody has something to hide.
Bunnie and Jinko allow us to be present, recognisable and ourselves while keeping parts of our lives for the people who actually belong in them.
That’s a choice we’re comfortable making.
And it’s a choice we’ll defend for the artists who work with us too.
The business is real.
The artists are real.
The music is real.
The people behind these identities are real.
I love that Distraction is such a tight-knit community! We are very much a family and there’s a lot of love and support for all the music that artists create. It’s such an incredible place to be a part of! ❤️
Xion here from Distraction Radio. Distraction is the place where artists can be themselves and be in a place where they can be with like minded people. We have a family here and I wouldn't have it any other way.
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