Artists will have spent weeks, months, sometimes years making the music. Record labels will have spent tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, recording, marketing and promoting each release. Managers will have spent countless hours planning the campaigns around them.

At 00:01 DSPs will refresh their biggest playlists and fans will begin listening immediately. TikTok will move, YouTube views will accumulate, data will pour in and conversations will begin taking shape across social media.

Yet at the exact moment the product goes live and the audience switches on, most of the industry behind it has switched off.

I’ve always found that strange.

Music is one of the most obviously 24 hour businesses in the world. People don’t stop listening because record labels close their office on Friday afternoon. The Spotify’s app doesn’t shut down at 6pm. TikTok doesn’t suddenly stop working over the weekend.

A record can be released at midnight on Friday and over the first 48 hours get added to global playlists, start accelerating on streaming or suddenly catch fire on social media. A clip from the video might become a meme. A lyric might turn into a TikTok trend. An artist might unexpectedly start getting dragged, praised or debated on Twitter/X. A celebrity might post the song to their Instagram story and suddenly put it in front of 20 million people.

These are exactly the moments when you want a team watching, making decisions and reacting in real time.

Instead, somebody usually notices it because they’re checking their phone while they’re supposed to be enjoying their weekend. A WhatsApp group starts moving, a few people jump in voluntarily and everyone else properly catches up on Monday morning.

By then, the moment to influence the outcome might have gone.

To understand how we ended up with a 24 hour product being managed by a Monday-to-Friday industry, you have to go back to how release days used to work. Some history for younger readers:

Until 2015 there wasn’t actually one global release day. Different countries released music on different days. In the UK, albums were traditionally released on Mondays and singles were usually released on Sundays. The US and Canada generally released on Tuesdays. Australia and Germany were already using Fridays.

Then the industry made a very sensible change.

On 10 July 2015 ‘New Music Friday’ arrived. Around 50 music markets moved towards a synchronised global release day, with new music becoming available from midnight local time on Friday. The thinking was that fans wanted new music heading into the weekend when they had more time to listen, shop, go out and talk about it online.

It worked.

Friday now feels completely natural as music’s release day. The entire rhythm of the recorded music business reorganised itself around the start of the weekend.

But there was one part of the system we forgot to reorganise….the people!

We moved our most important commercial moment of the week to Friday, but largely kept the workforce operating Monday to Friday.

Think about how peculiar that is.

Imagine a video game publisher launching the new FIFA or GTA at midnight a few hours after sending everybody home. Millions of people start playing and the servers are suddenly under enormous pressure. Social media lights up with people reacting to the game or reporting bugs. Player behaviour starts generating data and customer service demand increases.

The company doesn’t wait until Monday morning to find out what happened. It staffs around the launch because you organise your resources around when your customers are consuming your product.

Retail understands this. When stores are busiest, they put more people on the floor.

Amazon understands it. Warehouses and logistic networks operate shifts because people don’t stop ordering things when office hours end.

Gaming understands it. A global product launch requires people watching what is happening while people are actually using the product.

Yet in music we do something extraordinary.

We deliberately release our most important product at midnight on Friday, at the beginning of the period when millions of people have the most free time to consume it.

And then we go home.

The current system works because there are brilliant obsessive music people who care enough about their artists and their records to keep checking their phones when technically they’re not working.

You shouldn’t need a product manager, artist manager, publicist, agent, marketing manager, digital manager, A&R, streaming person or anyone else around a release to sacrifice their weekend because a record they care about has come out.

There should simply be people working.

This isn’t a record label problem by the way (hello to you reading) this is a global music industry problem.

Because everything is built around roughly the same working week. Labels, publishers, management companies, agencies and plenty of the wider infrastructure surrounding recorded music broadly follow conventional 9-5 office hours while the product itself operates continuously.

When I wrote something about this on Instagram a few weeks ago an old colleague text me saying “Austin how are you gonna convince staff to work weekends?” but changing work structure doesn’t mean making everyone work seven days a week.

It means accepting that a 24 hour industry needs shift patterns.

Teams across the business could work different schedules. Some could work Tuesday to Saturday, while others could work Sunday to Thursday. There could be dedicated weekend streaming, audience and release teams, with major releases given properly staffed launch windows in the same way companies resource major product launches in other industries.

People working evenings or weekends could also receive additional pay and flexible hours, as they do in many other industries.

So to be clear this isn’t an argument for people working more.

It’s an argument for the industry working differently.

If Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the most important periods for consumption, discovery and culture, why wouldn’t some of our workforce be structured around Friday, Saturday and Sunday?

Music now generates information almost instantly - the industry’s ability to respond should be equally fast.

Instead, something meaningful can happen on Friday night and the proper conversation about how to take advantage doesn’t begin until 10am on Monday.

In internet terms, that is an eternity.

To be clear, none of this is criticism of Spotify or the DSPs. I think moving towards a global Friday release day was a good decision. It aligned music around the consumer rather than around an outdated distribution system.

The problem is that the global music industry only completed half the transformation. We changed when the product arrives but didn’t change how the organisations surrounding it operate.

If the music industry really is a 24 hour business, it’s probably time we started running it like one.

This weeks’ RelatedQuote comes from a good friend of mine who has had a stellar career across management, publishing and record labels and is now running his own label. He says:

“I think having a focused, agile team working across traditional weekends could really supercharge priority releases. A straight seven-day week doesn’t make sense, but you could look at a shift-style model, similar to the fire service or police…. Music is obviously very different, but the principle is similar: we can’t always predict when a song will start moving or an opportunity will suddenly present itself. Having a team ready to react in real time could make a huge difference.”

Until next time,

Austin

As the World Cup kicks off this week I thought I’d share a funny little story. A couple of years ago I was in a VIP hospitality box at Arsenal’s stadium watching Arsenal play Chelsea. We were locked in one of the tightest battles the Premier League had seen in years. Every result felt like it could tilt the entire season.

In the box with me was the usual mix of random clients and staff. But the person who caught my attention was an unexpected guest. He was an international footballer who played for the very club Arsenal were trying to beat to the championship title. One of the oppositions most important (and famous) players. And yet there he was, sitting in the heart of a rival stadium in normal clothes watching the game like everyone else. Nobody seemed to notice him.

As the final whistle blew, I assumed he’d have a discreet exit plan like a backdoor route or security escort. At the very least, he’d wait for the crowds to go.

Instead, I watched him pull a Stone Island hoodie over his head, adjust his scarf to cover his mouth and melt into the crowd. No security or fanfare just a world class footballer dissolving into thousands of rival fans. My route out of the stadium and to my car followed his and I walked behind him as he mingled through the Arsenal fans, walk over the bridge and into a waiting Addison Lee. Not a single fan clocked it was him.

I always chuckle when I think about that moment.

Not because it was dramatic. It wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was mundane, quiet, precise and completely deliberate. He knew exactly how he was getting out before the game had ended. No hesitation or scrambling around - just a plan, executed cleanly.

Moving through rooms that weren’t built for you

The reason it stuck with me is because I’ve spent most of my career doing a version of the same thing. Moving through spaces where I wasn’t necessarily expected. Reading rooms quickly, working out where the power sat, what the unspoken rules were and how to navigate without drawing too much attention (sometimes hard / impossible when you’re the only person of colour in the room smh)

I had to learn young - joining the BBC at 19, surrounded by people who seemed to instinctively know how to conduct themselves in meetings, how to address senior people, how to use language that signalled competence without overstepping. I didn’t have any of that so I compensated with energy, curiosity and a willingness to do the work nobody else wanted. That bought me time while I figured out the codes.

Over the years, I got better at it. Older wiser mentors gave me advice on when to dial up and when to dial down. When to be loud in a room and when to sit back and absorb. When to push an idea forward and when to let someone else carry it so the politics didn’t get in the way.

The discreet footballer at the Emirates understood something similar. He was choosing not to be seen because the moment didn’t require it. There’s a difference between being invisible because you’re irrelevant and being invisible because you’ve decided that right now, silence serves you better than noise.

The loudest people aren’t always the most effective

I’ve noticed this pattern throughout my career. The people who move most effectively aren’t always the ones you’d pick out of a room. Some of the most powerful moves I’ve witnessed happened in complete silence. Things like deals being signed off before anyone even knew a conversation had started, or relationships built in the background that only became visible when the product becomes public. I always laugh to myself when I’m backstage at a festival and people almost faint when they see me talking to a random rock band member.

Meanwhile, I’ve also watched people broadcast every intention in real time and lose leverage before the ink was dry. Announce a project too early and the politics shift against you. Signal a move before it’s secured and someone else gets there first. Talk about what you’re building instead of building it and the energy dissipates into noise.

Notorious B.I.G had a bar for this. “Never let them know your next move, don’t you know Bad Boys move in silence?” I heard that as a teenager and it became a career principle. Keep the plan close until the execution is done.

(without getting too complex, sometimes you might want to talk about a ‘plan’ to throw people off the scent, while you work on something completely different)

Knowing when to surface

None of this means you should be permanently invisible. That’s a different trap. I’ve seen people stay so quiet for so long that by the time they resurfaced the world had moved on without them. Silence without purpose is just absence.

The skill is knowing which mode the moment requires. Are you in a building phase or a launch phase? Listening or leading? Absorbing or outputting? The answer changes week to week, sometimes day to day and in todays world maybe even hour to hour.

The people who last in any industry tend to understand this rhythm instinctively. They know that visibility and credibility are related but not the same thing. You can be everywhere and mean nothing. You can be nowhere and be building something that changes everything when it lands.

Exit strategies matter as much as entrances

Back to the footballer for a second. The thing that impressed me most wasn’t that he got out unnoticed. It was that the exit was clearly pre-planned. He’d thought about it before the game started. Probably before he even arrived. He knew the route, the timing, the stadium layout. By the time anyone might have clocked him, he was already in a car.

Knowing how to enter a room gets talked about constantly. How to make an impression. How to command attention. How to network but nobody ever talks about the exit.

In my experience, how you leave something matters at least as much as how you arrive. Leaving a company on your own terms versus being pushed. Walking away from a deal before it turns sour versus hanging on until it drags you down. Knowing when a project has peaked and stepping back before diminishing returns set in.

Timing isn’t just about when you show up. It’s about when you leave and how clean the exit is.

Today’s RelatedQuote comes from an artist I know who has sold millions of records globally. They said:

“The moment you start chasing visibility for its own sake, you’ve already lost. The work should make the noise. Not you.“

Until next time,

Austin

A few months back MTV stopped broadcasting in the UK and it got me thinking. Platforms that win in entertainment are those that take risks on emerging talent and grow alongside those new stars. History shows that the biggest leaps in platform success don’t come from working with established icons, but actually introducing unknown artists to the world and helping them blow up. Conversely, platforms that bank everything on the already famous often struggle to find an audience.

MTV in its 1990s glory days was the place where youth discovered the next big music acts and trends. Audiences relied on MTV as a gateway to new music and culture. By constantly airing fresh music videos from developing artists (alongside hits) MTV created superstars and defined pop culture. Its decline came later when it drifted from that mission. As one commentator put it “MTV no longer discovered culture - it started chasing it” . In chasing reality TV trends and established pop formulas, MTV lost its identity and its audience’s trust. The irony is that if MTV had stuck to taking chances on new music and curating emerging artists, it might still be dominant today .

Fast forward to the YouTube era and a similar growth story played out online. YouTube’s explosive growth in the late 2000s was fuelled by everyday creators and unknown musicians finding huge audiences. Justin Bieber was a Canadian kid uploading cover songs on YouTube before he was discovered and became a global pop icon. The platform didn’t need pre-existing superstars, it created new ones by giving unknown talent a stage.

TikTok is the latest proof: it rocketed from obscurity to a global phenomenon largely by turning ordinary teenagers into viral stars. Charli D’Amelio for instance became the first TikTok creator to exceed 100 million followers in less than two years after starting on the app at age 15 . No traditional celebrity drew those eyeballs to the platform – it was a brand new personality fostered entirely on a new platform. Audiences crave the authenticity of user (and sometimes tastemaker driven) grassroots content . New platforms grow fastest when they empower new voices.

A Personal Perspective: BBC Radio 1Xtra and the Rise of Grime / UK Rap

From my own career, I’ve witnessed how nurturing unknown talent can ignite a platform’s fortunes. I joined BBC Radio 1Xtra a few years after it launched. At the time I felt like a newcomer – in hindsight I was part of the station’s first generation building something special. 1Xtra was the BBC’s new digital venture aimed at Black music and culture, and from day one it made a point to champion new artists. The station mixed some established hits with a bunch of lesser-known tracks and breaking acts in its playlists . We had a mandate to give a platform to the UK’s underground talent – the rappers, singers and producers who weren’t getting mainstream radio play.

Growth in those early years was steady. But then, as the UK’s homegrown music started to erupt into the mainstream, 1Xtra’s audience surged – right alongside the rising stars we’d been supporting. It’s amazing to look back and realise how tightly the station’s trajectory was intertwined with the artists’ trajectories. 1Xtra took risks on artists when they were unknown and when they blew up, our brand’s credibility and audience size blew up too. Listeners remained loyal because they knew 1Xtra was where they’d hear the next big thing first. That credibility with new music made us essential, not just another channel playing what every other station was.

Spotify’s Boom: The Power of New Stars

I saw this dynamic again during my time at Spotify. During my time there Spotify experienced explosive global growth, evolving from a popular app into the world’s dominant music platform. Admittedly a lot of factors drove that expansion but a key ingredient was Spotify’s knack for creating new stars rather than simply serving up the same Top 40 as everyone else.

The company invested heavily in discovery features and curated playlists that would surface emerging artists from the flood of uploads each day, creating a huge pipeline of new fandom being created out of thin air. Spotify’s ecosystem allowed these new voices to find an audience first and then traditional media followed. The platform grew in tandem with the success of the artists it elevated. When people realised the next Billie Eilish or Stormzy could be discovered on Spotify, it reinforced Spotify’s cultural centrality, driving even more users to the service.

From a platform strategy perspective, the benefits of championing new talent are multifold:

• Differentiation: Unknown talent offers exclusive content. A new platform likely can’t secure the biggest superstar’s latest album (nor stand out by doing so), but it can be the place where listeners discover the cool new artist before everyone else. This fresh content differentiates the platform in a crowded market.

• Mutual Growth: When you help break an artist, they and their fanbase have a special allegiance to your platform. Those fans will flock to where their newfound favourite started out. The artists too, often stay loyal and engage more with the platform that supported them early on. This cycle means as the artist’s star rises, so does the platform’s.

• Cultural Credibility: Platforms that consistently elevate emerging voices become seen as trend setters and culture makers. That credibility is priceless. It’s why YouTube became synonymous with youth culture, or why early MTV was the arbiter of cool. In contrast, when a platform is perceived as just replaying whatever’s already popular, it feels stale.

• Sustainability: Nurturing unknowns is often more cost effective and sustainable than shelling out for established star power. Established stars come with big price tags and high expectations. New talent, on the other hand, grows organically. I remember one streaming service tried to debut with a roster of superstar exclusive album releases, only to learn that you can’t buy global consumer loyalty with star power alone. Those stars already had outlets, fans didn’t need a new platform to access them. The lesson is money can’t guarantee eyeballs, and recycling known hits & artists won’t spark the next revolution.

New Products, New Growth: Innovation Lessons from Netflix (and Others)

This principle of “new stars drive growth more than old hits” isn’t limited to music or video platforms – it echoes in the broader business world too. Often, the thing that blows up a company is a new product or innovation, not the legacy product it started with.

Take Netflix as an example. It began as a ‘DVD by mail’ service competing with Blockbuster. But its explosive growth came when it took a risk on a totally new kind of product: original streaming content. They poured $100 million into a political drama series, House of Cards, featuring a cast and creator team that traditional TV networks had overlooked as too risky. It was a bold gamble and one that might have fucked the company up if it failed . Instead, House of Cards became a runaway hit and a turning point in Netflix’s evolution. In the two years following its release, Netflix gained 24 million new subscribers (growing from 33 million to 57 million) and saw its stock price nearly triple . That single new series (followed by other originals like Orange Is the New Black) did more to propel Netflix into a global powerhouse than any amount of licensed reruns ever could. By investing in new content that people couldn’t get elsewhere, Netflix transformed its image from a utility service to an entertainment destination. The rest of the industry had to follow its lead.

Likewise, major record labels know that while back catalog sales are nice, the big spikes in revenue and cultural impact come from breaking a new artist with a hit record. Every massive star whether it’s The Beatles in the ‘60s, Michael Jackson in the ‘80s or Drake in the 2010s was once an unknown act that some label took a chance on. The risk is high (many new signings fail to catch fire), but the reward of finding the next big thing is what keeps the music industry alive. In tech, we see companies that stagnate when they milk their existing products too long versus those that gamble on new ideas reaping the rewards. Apple’s resurgence in the 2000s for instance wasn’t because it sold more Macintosh computers – it was because it created the iPod and later the iPhone, entirely new product categories that attracted new “fans” (customers) to the platform. Innovation and discovery drive growth, whether we’re talking songs, shows, or software.

The Road Ahead: Empowering the Next Generation of Creators

Looking to the future, this dynamic will likely intensify. We’re in an era of democratised creation – from musicians recording in their bedrooms, to filmmakers on YouTube, to TikTok influencers and beyond. The next MTV or Netflix will be the one that best harnesses that creator energy and shines a spotlight on talent that would otherwise stay in the shadows. Even as AI and virtual reality loom on the horizon the human desire for something new, exciting and authentic will remain. Platforms that succeed in 2027 and beyond will be those that amplify fresh voices rather than those that simply repurpose yesterday’s hits in a new format.

Every time I write one of these pieces, I like to end with a little wisdom from someone in my contacts list. I got a text recently from an old colleague that feels appropriate here, and it’s a fitting anonymous quote to close on:

“Don’t build a new empire with old kings – crown the next generation instead.”

Till next time

I’ve always loved the science behind music. Songs are full of patterns, signals and small details that change how people respond to them.

Now thanks to AI I don’t have to spend weeks learning new data systems. So one lazy Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago I decided to dissect some UK chart data.

I pulled apart the top 1,047 streaming songs from the last 16 months (January 2025 to April 2026) and looked at them from a bunch of different angles to get a closer look at the anatomy of what songs worked and why. This started as a massive article but I didn’t wanna bore you too much so I’ve selected some of the more interesting points.

A quick caveat before you dive in: while the full dataset covers 1,047 songs, some of the findings come from smaller subcategories where a couple of outliers can skew the picture. I’ve kept those in where the data still feels interesting, but the findings backed by hundreds of songs are the ones I’d trust most.

None of this is a formula for making a hit and like all data, it should be treated with a degree of caution. Some of it backed up instincts I already had, some of it genuinely surprised me - all of it made me more curious.

All comments and contradictions welcome! enjoy

Title Word Count
One word titles average ~590k weekly streams and is also the most common title format. Whether shorter titles perform better because they're easier to find, easier to remember or something else is an open question.

Title Opener
38 songs open with Don't, Can't, Never, No, or Ain't and they average about 4.4% fewer streams than everything else. What's interesting is some of the songs on the list:

• Don’t Stop Believin’ - Journey

• Don’t Stop Me Now - Queen

• Don’t Look Back in Anger - Oasis

• Can’t Stop the Feeling! - Justin Timberlake

These are some of the most iconic titles ever written and they’re in the lower performing category. Which raises the question - would they stream a few percent higher with a different first word?

Apostrophes In Title
Titles with apostrophes average 5.6% fewer weekly streams than clean titles. The obvious theory is search inconsistency: DSPs don’t always handle apostrophes cleanly in search and listeners type them in different ways. Whether that fully explains the gap is less clear, but the pattern is worth noting.

Lyric Word Count
200 to 299 words appears to be the sweet spot and its also where most songs fall. Whether that word count helps drive streams or simply reflects the kind of songs that tend to perform well is hard to say. The under 100 group is only 12 songs so don't read too much into that end of the table.

Most Common Words
The most used word across all 1,047 songs is I'm with 3,692 mentions. Know ranks above Love. Don't (a negative) sits second overall, above every word of desire or connection in the dataset. Baby still clocks 1,494 uses so pop hasn't abandoned its conventions. But the shape of the language is curious…

Dominant Tense
Past tense songs average the highest streams. Does streaming skew toward replay and memory rather than anticipation? These are all popular songs so people clearly stream every tense. But the gradient is consistent and points at something interesting about how music functions in people's lives.

Lyric Sentiment
Dark lyrics average more streams than bright ones, despite bright being the most common by far. The data isn't saying bright music fails - every song here is popular. It's just saying the darker leaning songs pull slightly harder when you compare like for like.

Topics / Subject Matter
Love and devotion is the most written about topic but sits fifth for average streams. Night and party leads, followed by heartbreak and identity. The question isn't whether love songs work - clearly they do. It's whether the sheer volume of them means any individual love song faces more competition than a song about something less ubiquitous.

Explicit vs clean
Explicit songs average 548k, clean songs 546k. Essentially identical which is interesting because for decades the music industry managed explicit content as a commercial risk - parental advisories, radio edits, playlist restrictions etc. The streaming data doesn't reflect any of that in audience behaviour. Whether that's the audience evolving, the platforms normalising it or something else isn't clear, but the number is the number.

Dominant Cover Colour
Take this one with a pinch of salt but the general pattern across larger groups is that darker, more restrained colours outperform brighter ones.

Cover Darkness By Era
Dark covers have increased steadily across every era - whether artists are responding to audience behaviour, platforms are surfacing darker visuals or it's just an aesthetic cycle is hard to know. The direction is consistent though.

*Bonus point - the highest performing combination is dark artwork paired with neutral lyrics

Artist Gender × Lyric Topic
Almost identical distributions across most topics. The one clear gap: female artists write heartbreak at nearly double the rate of male artists….whether that reflects lived experience, audience expectation or commercial calculation is a conversation worth having.

Hook Placement
Songs where the title appears later in the lyrics average almost 10% more streams than songs where it lands in the first 30 words. That slightly runs against the instinct to front load for streaming. Whether delayed hooks cause higher streams or whether they're just a feature of songs with enough gravity to earn the wait is hard to separate. Treat as directional.

Repetition Density
Songs with more varied lyrics (where each line feels different from the last) average more streams than songs built around heavy repetition. The more you repeat the same lines, the lower the average. That said, some of the biggest songs in the dataset are extremely repetitive and still massive, so this isn't a rule just a pattern worth noticing.

Until next time

Austin

So why do audiences engage in online content but don’t take the extra swipe or tap to stream the song? we usually just assume that somethings broken in the conversion funnel, that you need a better call to action, a better video or a more efficient message.

I think the issue is a bit more fundamental. We treat the stream as the destination when it’s actually the receipt, because the decision to stream a song has already been made somewhere else.

Last week I read an interesting article on Vogue about how Gen Z has broken the traditional marketing funnel. It confirmed something I’ve felt for a while - the structured ‘awareness to conversion’ marketing journey no longer really reflects how young people behave.

Below is a loose collection of thoughts based off that article. Some of this will be very obvious to people who live and breathe marketing. For others at the start of their journey it might give food for thought.

You’re Competing With The Universe.

The competition isn’t other releases that week - you’re competing with everything that exists on a phone at any given moment. Netflix / football clips / a group chat / a meme / a news notification about the Iran war etc etc etc.

So if music is competing with every form of distraction and entertainment at once, should we still be treating content as a signpost to stream the song, or should we be asking whether said content is strong enough to hold attention in its own right first?

The Stream Is a Receipt.

By the time someone presses play on Spotify or Apple Music, the interesting part is usually over. The decision to care was made somewhere else - in a WhatsApp group chat, a Reddit thread, a 3am Snap scroll or after Shazamming something they heard in a rave.

That means the play isn’t really discovery, it’s more like evidence or a lagging indicator. A logged action that tells you something already clicked earlier, somewhere upstream. So the question is - if intent is being formed off-platform in places labels can’t properly track, should you be optimising for the most visible part of the journey, or the most influential one?

The Myth Of Repeat Exposure.

Some people still believe that if someone sees an artist enough times, they will eventually convert. That may have worked in the past and still works in some industries, where frequency builds familiarity and familiarity increases the chance of purchase.

Music is messier than that. Someone can see an artist ten times across ten different platforms and feel nothing, then hear one snippet at exactly the right moment and suddenly care. Whereas someone else can discover an artist once, go straight to the platform, save the album, buy tickets and follow them within five minutes.

Exposure on its own isn’t enough. Repetition doesn’t guarantee interest and interest doesn’t mean that person will stay interested. But when someone finally is in the mood to care, is there actually anything there for them to latch onto? if the artist’s world still feels vague or half-baked, all that exposure did was give them more chances to scroll past.

Boundaries are gone.

Most record labels still have separate teams for marketing, digital, content, press, social etc. Each team owns a piece of the funnel cake with relatively clear lines of delineation.

The consumer journey doesn’t respect those boundaries anymore. A fan might discover an artist through a meme that the social team had nothing to do with. Their first interaction with an artist might be a street interview clip that the marketing team didn’t commission. The thing that finally makes a fan stream might be a fan made edit in a group chat that nobody on the label even saw.

The world where responsibility could be neatly assigned to one team at each stage of the journey has gone. It will be interesting to see how content organisations evolve in response, and whether future structures are built less around internal functions and more around the way audiences move (which may mean regular re-orgs like tech…)

The Most Powerful Channel Is Invisible.

Discovery now happens in places that are invisible to analytics:
- WhatsApp groups
- iMessage threads
- Discord servers
- Close Friends stories
- Private Snap accounts.

These are places where people actually share things they genuinely like, not the performative sharing of public social media but the real stuff.

This is where taste travels and it’s completely unmeasurable. You can’t put spend behind it. You can’t optimise it. You can’t A/B test it. You can only create something good enough that people want to send it to someone they trust.

That might be terrifying for anyone who builds marketing plans around trackable metrics, but it should actually be liberating. Because it means the single most important thing you can do is make the work undeniable.

Ecosystem vs Activity

Most artists don’t have an ecosystem, they have motion. Content is going out, clips are being posted, money is being spent, but none of it adds up to a world a fan can actually enter and understand. An ecosystem gives people a clear feeling of who the artist is, no matter where they land first - whether it is a live clip, an interview, a meme or a behind the scenes moment. Activity fills the feed but an ecosystem gives people somewhere to go.

You Don’t Own Fans. You Rent Their Attention.

Loyalty is far more fluid than the industry wants it to be. You don’t own a fan and you have to earn their attention repeatedly. Every interaction either reinforces or weakens the connection. Past success doesn’t carry future releases and each moment has to stand on its own.

The common assumption is that an established artist carries a bankable audience into each new cycle. That’s less and less true. An artist who was everywhere six months ago can feel completely irrelevant if the gap is filled with silence or weak content.

Today’s RelatedQuote comes from a Marketing Director at a major label. They say:

“Some of the most important marketing in music now happens before the data even wakes up. By the time a song shows up in the numbers, the audience has often been talking about it, testing it and passing it around for days.”

Until next time.

Austin

This is a true story.

I was 19, ironing a cheap Zara shirt in my bedroom, getting ready for a job interview at the BBC. The TV was on (BBC News, as it usually was) and I wasn’t really watching - I was more half thinking about interview questions, half trying not to burn a hole in the only shirt I owned.

The lead story was the German election. Angela Merkel had just won. I absorbed it the way you do when something is playing in the background. Filed it nowhere in particular and kept ironing.

A couple of hours later I’m sitting across from a serious looking dude answering questions for a role at the BBC. The job description said they wanted someone with ‘a strong interest in current affairs’…it was obvious I barely qualified but I could talk and I had energy so I figured that counted for something.

We wrapped up. I thanked him, stood up and put my hand on the door, fairly certain I hadn’t done enough to win the job.

“Hold on Austin. It says here your favourite TV channel is the news. You’re nineteen. That can’t be right.”

Me: “Yeah, it is.”

“…..Why?”

Me: “Truthfully, I just prefer it sometimes to MTV and Sky Sports.”

He gave me the look my teachers used to give me when I handed in a homework excuse.

“Alright. Who won the German election this morning?”

Me: “Angela Merkel.”

“Who did she beat?”

Me: “Gerhard Schröder.”

He leaned back, grinned and said he’ll be in touch.

That’s how I got the job that kickstarted my career.

It wasn’t due to me being the best candidate or having prepared the right answers - but because a piece of information I overheard while doing something mundane landed at the exact moment someone needed to hear it.

I think about that a lot.

We have a complicated relationship with luck. Most people believe in it privately but don’t credit it publicly because it kinda fucks up the story we prefer - that effort is rewarded proportionally and the best person usually wins.

Hard work puts you near opportunity and preparation means you can use it when it comes. But the actual collision - your knowledge meeting a gap in the world at the right second - that part is rarely yours to engineer.

If I’d had Sky Sports on that morning I couldn’t have answered that question. If the election had been the day before, it might not have come up. None of that was in my control.

I’m not saying don’t work hard. The Merkel answer only existed because I’d spent months doing repetitive, unglamorous work in media monitoring, reading things I wasn’t asked to read, building habits that had no obvious payoff at the time. The preparation was real. But the moment to use it arrived by chance.

With that being said, you can control the size of your fishing net. Read outside your usual interests, go to things where you don’t know anyone, follow threads that don’t seem relevant yet etc. None of it guarantees anything, but the more you put in the more surface there is for luck to land on.

Most people who didn’t get the job that day were probably more qualified than me. Some of them may have been better prepared. The difference was a news broadcast I wasn’t even properly watching.

Today’s RelatedQuote comes from a former colleague who is a BBC senior executive:

“Music, showbiz, media - these are not fair industries. Luck plays a huge part. But everything you do, no matter how small, is preparing you to take that lucky opportunity when it arrives. And it will.”

Until next week.

Austin

I didn’t get here by following a plan.

There was no career pathway designed for someone from my background, with my interests, heading in my direction. No curriculum at school that covered “how to go from a council estate to an OBE” No mentor who had walked the exact same path and could hand me a map.

What I had was the ability to steal.

Not in the criminal sense (promise) but in the creative sense. I took pieces of wisdom from wherever I could find them and patched them together into something that worked.

Where the material came from

Jay-Z has a bar where he says “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” That line rewired how I thought about personal brand years before anyone was calling it personal brand, and it changed how I approached things from my mid-twenties onwards.

In Goodfellas, there is a scene where Henry Hill walks Karen through the side entrance of a restaurant. Past the kitchen, past the queue, through doors that weren’t meant for the general public. No reservation or waiting in line…a table appears from nowhere, carried over heads and placed in front of the stage. That scene taught me more about access and confidence than any corporate training day. I understood that the front door is not the only door, and often not the best one.

Nas said “sleep is the cousin of death.” I first heard that as a kid and didn’t know what it meant. Years later while building a career, it became a mantra. Not about literally avoiding sleep but about urgency and the cost of switching off while the window is still open.

I’ll never forget coming out of Oxford Circus tube station a few days before the Rugby World Cup final and seeing this massive billboard plastered all over Niketown:

It was a reference to media and fans thinking the England rugby team (the current champions) were washed and wouldn’t make it to the final. Four words on a cliff edge. “Not Without A Fight.”….. I didn’t even follow rugby properly but that line lodged itself in my brain and never left. You might lose in life (and at some point almost certainly will) but you don’t just hand it over. You do not have to win every ‘fight’ but you should never make it easy for anyone to beat you. The people who last in any industry are not the ones with the best record, they are the ones who refused to go quietly…

None of these sources were designed to teach me anything. They were just art, conversation and culture doing what they do - reflecting the world back at you in a way that occasionally lands with precision.

The difference between consuming culture passively and using it actively is attention. Most people hear a lyric and it washes over them. Occasionally, one lands differently. It articulates something you have been feeling but couldn’t express.

When that happens, steal it, write it down, remember it and use it.

The myth of original thinking

Nobody builds from scratch. Every successful person I have met is, to some degree, a thief (OK I’ll put it nicely ‘a patchwork of influences’)

They took frameworks from mentors / language from peers / strategies from competitors etc. They observed what worked, adapted it to their context and deployed it as if it were their own.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the touchscreen phone. Touchscreen devices existed way before the iPhone - but what Apple did was look at what was already out there, strip away the complexity and present it in a way that made everyone else’s version look obsolete. The technology was borrowed but the execution was original.

Virgil Abloh built an entire design philosophy around what he called a “3% approach,” taking existing objects and altering them just enough to create something new. Quentin Tarantino has never hidden the fact that his films are assembled from other people’s films, recut and recombined until they become unmistakably his.

This is how knowledge actually builds up - ideas circulate and get refined. The person who applies an idea effectively in a new context has created something genuinely valuable, even if the raw material came from someone else (just listen to your favourite song by X that’s influenced by or samples Y)

The most dangerous myth in business and creative industries is that you need to be original to be successful. You don’t. You need to be observant, selective and effective.

Who the real mentors are

When people talk about mentors, they usually picture a formal arrangement. A senior person taking a junior person under their wing with scheduled meetings and structured advice. This is how most young execs come to me asking for help.

I tell them that’s one way but it’s not the only way and its actually not the most common one either.

Most of my mentors didn’t know they were mentoring me. They were colleagues who handled a situation well and I took note. Or strangers who said something smart on the bus and I overheard it or a rapper who compressed an entire life philosophy into sixteen bars. None of them sat me down and ‘mentored’ me. They just did or said something at the right time and I was paying enough attention to take it with me.

The trick is to treat everything as a potential source of wisdom. Not in a forced, self-helpy way but with genuine curiosity and an awareness that useful information doesn’t care about its packaging. It arrives in rap bars, casual convos, films, arguments and throwaway comments from people who have no idea they just said something valuable.

How to steal effectively

There are two parts to this.

The first is exposure. You need to be in contact with a wide range of inputs. Read and learn things outside your industry. Talk to people outside your circle and consume culture that has nothing to do with your job. Things will naturally pop up and you’ll get a lightbulb moment where the ‘thing’ sticks with you.

The second part is application of that ‘thing’. An idea has no value sitting in your notebook. It has value when you use it. When you use a negotiation principle you overheard from a stranger to close a deal. When you use a Martin Scorsese camera technique as a metaphor to explain pacing in a marketing campaign. When you use a Biggie lyric to remind yourself to keep your mouth shut before a deal is signed.

Successful Ideas = Exposure + Application

That cycle, repeated over years, is how you build a career that no formal education could replicate.

A final thought

This series of articles has been built from the same principle. Stories from my career, observations from my life, fragments of wisdom stolen from people who did not know they were teaching me anything.

I don’t have all the answers. I am still figuring most of it out. But I have enough material to share and enough ego to put it on a page.

If any of it has been useful, take it. Steal what works. Leave the rest.

That has always been the approach.

Today’s RelatedQuote comes from a rapper who has streamed billions of times around the world including having #1 hits. They said:

“My education was playing the background at first then just paying attention”

Austin

(This is not a critique of any single workplace. It’s a reflection built from personal experience and from dozens of conversations with founders, executives and operators who all describe the same issues in different buildings.)

Block after block, hour after hour.

No white space, no thinking time, no decompression.

In most organisations, entire days disappear into meetings - different rooms and slightly different audiences but the same information and identical outcomes.

By 6pm everyone feels busy, yet very little meaningful work has actually moved forward.

The Real Cost Of ‘back-to-back’

Useless meetings disrupt time but more importantly they mess up cognitive switching.

You cannot jump from a commercial negotiation to a creative brainstorm to a HR update and expect depth. After any serious conversation, you need space to process, recalibrate and think properly.

In my experience the best ideas don’t usually arrive in the meeting itself so when diaries are stacked wall to wall, you never reach that second phase of thinking. You basically just end up skimming across the surface all day to survive until it’s time to go home.

Repetition Kills Momentum

Large organisations leak hours through repetition.

The same update delivered five times, the same slides read aloud to the same people, the same context explained again because someone just wants to be in the room.

Half the attendees often do not need to be there. They attend out of fear of missing something or being excluded.

That’s how calendars fill up like a game of Tetris.

And Yet, Meetings Do Matter

Meetings are very powerful when used properly.

When you first sit down with an artist and see something intangible in the way they move. The tone in their voice. The way they command a small room before they have a large one. You can’t spot that in an email.

In music, seeing an artist live can change your conviction in seconds. You feel the reaction. You read the body language and sense star quality before the data proves it.

The same applies in business - there are some things you can’t outsource to AI or capture fully in a Google doc. Obvious things such as delivering bad or sensitive news demand in person conversations.

Presence can’t be automated and that’s when meetings become invaluable.

The Room Is a Tool

Some leaders use meetings as a stage.

They’ll call a meeting to rally a team around an objective or raise energy before the launch of something.

Sometimes it might be to reset culture after a tough period or to articulate purpose in a way that slides never could.

Those leaders understand that conviction is contagious in person (so is fear hehe) so momentum is easier to ignite when people can feel it, not just read it.

Development Happens In Rooms

I’ve always thought of meetings as classrooms.

During Covid, interns and junior staff lost something previous generations had. They were no longer sitting at the edge of rooms absorbing language, tone, strategy and politics.

They missed the informal apprenticeship - the bit where you learn how decisions are shaped by watching them happen.

It’s where you pick up the rhythm of a business, the unspoken cues, the throwaway comments that give you a little nugget of information to be used at a later date.

Meetings, when designed well, build culture.

The Company That Got It Right

I once worked for a company that handled meetings in an interesting way.

They held ‘Daily Stand Ups’ - Fifteen minutes with everyone standing. It changes behaviour because you get to the point faster and respect the clock.

Each person answered:

• What I am working on

• What is blocked

• What I need

Then it ended.

It created clarity without consuming the day and meant the rest of the calendar had space for thinking and execution.

When Meetings Should Be Used

So if you’re a young leader starting your journey on managing teams here’s my advice of meetings. Use a meeting when:

• A real decision needs live debate

• Sensitive information is being delivered for the first time

• A relationship is being built

• Energy needs to be raised

• Other staff benefit from observing the discussion

• Culture and language need to be reinforced

When meetings should not be used

Do not call a meeting:

• To repeat information already written

• To avoid making a decision alone

• To include people who do not influence the outcome

• To read slides aloud

• To “check in” without a defined purpose

• To fill time

If the outcome of a meeting is “lets book in more time” the meeting probably did not need to happen.

Reclaim the Calendar

You do not need fewer conversations you just need fewer meetings.

Design meetings deliberately - keep them sharp and protect thinking time.

Use rooms for belief, alignment and decisions. Use emails and text for everything else.

Today’s RelatedQuote™ comes from a founder friend of mine who scaled a global creative business. They said:

“If everyone’s in the meeting, nobody’s in charge.”

Until next time,

Austin

There is a phrase people reach for in music when an artist rises too cleanly.

“Industry plant.”

What it usually means is “this person did not earn it properly”. They skipped the hard part and the machine carried them.

But is that really the case?

In sport, early identification is not controversial. When a kid shows potential ability, coaches move quickly. They invest before consensus forms and provide extra coaching, structure, money, nutrition and training. Nobody demands proof of suffering or calls it illegitimate.

A previously unknown 17 year old kid getting announced in a Premier League football squad is not accused of jumping the queue. We just assume someone saw something special and acted on it.

Music pretends to be different. It is not.

The mythology around music says greatness should come from obscurity. Bedrooms, rejection, and years of being ignored before anyone pays attention. When an artist breaks that pattern, people reach for language that restores moral balance. “Industry plant” becomes a way to say this feels wrong, therefore it must be fake.

Every talent driven industry runs on signal detection and money allocation. Music included. Sometimes that signal is obvious and measurable with things such as streaming numbers, ticket sales and social media followers. Other times the signal is less visible and more subjective - quality of music, craft, charisma, work rate etc. A record label’s job is to place bets before everyone else agrees (I’m talking all record labels by the way not just “majors”)

So sometimes, when someone spots raw potential before the wider public does, the bet is placed on what that person could become, not on results that already exist.

Sport is blatant about this.

Lionel Messi did not grind anonymously into adulthood. Barcelona spotted him as a child, bought him into their famed La Masia academy, and covered his medical treatment. The upside justified the early investment cost.

Serena and Venus Williams did not stumble into excellence. Their childhoods were engineered around performance. Investment, structure and a team long before anyone called it destiny.

LeBron James was treated like an asset while still in school. He was surrounded by scouts, media and infrastructure. The machine started early because the potential talent was impossible to ignore.

We never question whether these people deserved early investment. We assume the investment existed because the talent existed.

Music resists this logic because it clashes with the idea that merit equals struggle.

Most people in music never receive early backing. Not because they are cursed or blocked but because the signal is not yet strong enough to justify the bet. Watching someone else get fast tracked while you are self funding and invisible hurts, but early backing does not guarantee success

It does increases exposure, but the truth is most heavily supported artists still fail. Just like most academy football players never reach the first team. Selection raises the ceiling but it does not remove the floor. Resources can amplify what is already there but if the foundation is weak, money just accelerates the failure.

This is where the industry plant accusation sometimes falls apart. If backing alone created success, labels would be infallible. They are not. They miss constantly.

Don’t get me wrong - resources do matter, but so does timing, luck, talent and thousands of other variables. Talent alone is insufficient - the winners tend to align the variables (sometimes by design sometimes by luck)

There are occasions where the ‘industry plant’ criticism is justified. Sometimes teams try to manufacture credibility instead of earning it. Fake backstories, botted streams etc - that exists and always has in one form or another.

But that’s different from early investment in real talent. One is fabrication, the other is conviction.

Not every fast rise is artificial. Not every quiet beginning is noble. Some artists are simply identified earlier because someone recognised something before the crowd did.

The uncomfortable truth is that the system rewards foresight. If you can see it before everyone else, you gain advantage. That is how competitive industries function.

You may not be chosen early. That does not mean you are excluded. It just means the burden of proof is still on you.

In this game, only two outcomes matter.

1. You are chosen early.

Or

2. You build enough momentum that not choosing you looks like a mistake.

This week’s RelatedQuote™ comes from a friend who played football at international level and has now gone on to become a coach, spotting early talent. They say:

“This game never rewards struggle alone. It rewards the people who can spot the angle before anyone else can, then execute when the timing is right.”

Until next time

Austin

I was 18 when I joined a ‘media monitoring’ agency based in Shoreditch.

Back then, companies, celebrities and institutions paid firms like ours to track how they were being talked about across newspapers, magazines, online websites and TV bulletins.

Our job was to read and watch everything, pull out every mention, log it, assess whether it mattered, then feed it back in a way clients could actually use.

Day one.

On my first day I shuffled in wearing a cheap suit - slightly intimidated, slightly excited, and they handed me a client list. This was the list of clients I had to search for online.

Right at the top: The BBC.

I remember thinking “wow….day one and they’re trusting me with one of the most important companies in the world.” I genuinely believed this was a sign. Big responsibility. Big faith. Big Austin.

What I didn’t realise yet was that the BBC wasn’t a reward but the punishment.

The reality.

The BBC appeared everywhere. Thousands of mentions a day. Every newspaper. Every website. Every broadcast bulletin. Politics. Culture. Scandals. Wins. Losses. Opinion pieces. Regional stories. International stories.

It meant reading about the BBC over and over and over again, day after day - just relentlessly mind numbing and boring in a way that makes time slow down.

It was mentally draining, repetitive, thankless work. The kind of job where you watch the clock more than the screen and you start questioning your life choices before lunch.

The part no one tells you.

But…here’s the thing. That curse quietly turned into a blessing.

Because repetition has a funny side effect. It teaches you things whether you like it or not.

By sheer volume and osmosis, I started to understand the BBC better than most people. Its structure, its politics, its priorities. Who mattered and who didn’t. Which stories escalated and which ones died. How it behaved when under pressure. What it cared about publicly versus privately.

No one sat me down and trained me. No one told me I was learning anything valuable. I just absorbed it, day after day, article after article.

Without realising it, I was becoming an expert.

This is the stuff no one really tells you early on. Sometimes the most valuable knowledge doesn’t come from exciting roles or flashy titles. It comes from being stuck in something dull long enough that patterns start to reveal themselves.

The job you currently hate might be the job that gives you an unfair edge later.

I’ve seen this play out again and again. Someone entering the music industry through typing up metadata updates ends up knowing music catalogue rights better than senior executives. Someone folding clothes on the shop floor ends up understanding fit, sizing, returns, and buying behaviour better than the head office. Someone dealing with supermarket customer complaints ends up understanding product flaws better than the people who designed it.

Boredom forces proximity and proximity creates insight.

Before all of that.

Between 16 and 17, I worked in a supermarket. Early mornings stacking shelves, long shifts on tills, cleaning up mess, dealing with rude customers and the odd crackhead thief.

At the time, it felt like nothing. Just work to pay for trainers and nights out.

Looking back, it taught me a bunch of things that came in handy later in my career:

• How to stay calm when someone’s angry

• How to deal with pressure without passing it on

• How to turn up even when you don’t feel like it

• How to read people quickly

• How to spot problems before they escalate

• How to speak to anyone, regardless of colour, sexuality or social background

• How to take feedback without taking it personally

May sound simple, but these type of things are essential survival skills in any leadership role so if you have ambitions of climbing, make sure you tick most of the above as it sets the foundations for the other skills you’ll need.

If this is you right now.

So if you’re working in JD Sports, Tesco, Greggs, a call centre, a warehouse, behind a screen doing something painfully repetitive, don’t write it off as wasted time.

That work is building habits, discipline, awareness, pattern recognition, and emotional control. The things that actually matter when responsibility increases.

A successful person’s climb rarely starts in the spotlight. In fact more often it starts in places no one’s impressed by.

Don’t underestimate boring work. Don’t rush past it just because it doesn’t look sexy on LinkedIn. Sometimes the unglamorous grind is quietly turning you into the person who knows more than everyone else in the room.

And one day, that’s exactly what makes you dangerous.

A final thought.

I always end these posts with an anonymous quote from somebody in my phone book. Today’s quote comes from an artist manager based in South America, who has sold millions of records globally. They said “The jobs that feel beneath you early on are usually the ones teaching you the most. If you stick around long enough to learn what’s really happening, you end up ten steps ahead without anyone noticing.”

Austin

(ps - I said in my first post all my articles would be 100% handwritten with no AI used at all. That’s true, but from time to time I’ll use AI to generate illustrative images.)

Early in my career, long before offices and spreadsheets, I watched the same pattern repeat itself while working weekend student jobs.

In supermarkets and department stores, the roles were simple and the hierarchy was clear. Most people did exactly what was asked, no more and no less. They clocked in, stayed in their lane, waited to be told what to do, then clocked out. But there were a few who moved differently. They volunteered for the busy shifts and solved problems before a supervisor noticed them. They found ways to be useful beyond their job title, and as a result, they were trusted more, seen more, and given more responsibility, even in environments where progression wasn’t really supposed to exist.

Fast forward to corporate life and most people follow the structure exactly as it is presented to them. You wait for your line manager to pass information on. You respect the org chart and stay inside the edges of your job description. Progress comes from being patient and reliable.

I learned quite quickly that this approach had a ceiling.

In every organisation I entered, there were a small number of people who treated the structure as a guide rather than a boundary. They understood how things were meant to work, but they did not assume that was the only way they could work. When timing mattered, they took ideas directly to senior people. They placed themselves in conversations that were not strictly theirs, but where they could genuinely add value.

That behaviour disrupted the default rhythm of the organisation by quietly challenging how things usually flowed. They bent the rules without snapping them and behaved as if the invitation was already theirs. Over those first few formative years it clicked for me - playing safe keeps you safe, but it rarely moves you forward.

As my own career progressed, I realised I was slowly becoming that disruptive person.

In another environment, later on, I noticed I was suddenly in rooms that technically sat above my level. Strategy conversations and early stage planning meetings etc. That access did not come because someone promoted me into it. It came because I made myself useful early.

I would follow conversations that interested me, even when I was not copied in. I would send notes after meetings I had no official reason to attend. I would reach out to senior people directly with ideas. I’m sure I annoyed some people but over time, that behaviour stopped looking unusual and started looking normal.

People assumed I belonged in those spaces because I behaved like I did.

The truth is that most organisations reward impact more than obedience, even if they pretend otherwise. The people who rise fastest are often the ones who understand that the system is more flexible than it looks from the outside.

This is why playing it straight so often fails.

A lot of people are trained to be good students at work. How any times have you heard things like “Follow the process”... “Respect the hierarchy”…' “Wait your turn”…. “Do not overstep”…. “Do not upset anyone.” … “Do not be seen as difficult.”

That advice keeps you employable. It does not make you exceptional.

Workplaces are full of invisible rules that matter far less than people think, and unwritten rules that matter far more. The people who stall are usually the ones who treat guidelines like commandments. They wait for permission that never arrives. They stick rigidly to job descriptions written by someone who sometimes has never even done the job themselves.

Then they look up a few years later and wonder how someone else ended up so far ahead.

Winners are not reckless and are rarely chaotic (I’m sure all of my previous managers would beg to differ!) They understand risk, politics, and consequence. They study the rules closely enough to know which ones are structural and which ones are habits pretending to be rules. They know when to push and when to pause, when to escalate and when to stay quiet, and when asking forgiveness is smarter than waiting for permission.

There is a clear parallel in tech. The reason technology companies move so quickly is because they are structurally biased towards action over permission. They build, test, iterate, then deal with the fallout. That speed creates breakthroughs, but can also create damage when judgment lags behind ambition. We have seen it clearly with AI models trained on questionable data, products released before they work, and platforms scaling faster than their sense of responsibility.

Bending rules only works when it sits inside clear legal and ethical boundaries. The people who tend to last understand exactly where it is and refuse to cross it. Once you lose that discipline, you stop being someone who gets ahead and start being someone who causes harm. The difference is subtle, but the consequences are not.

So, what does all this mean for young people starting out on the corporate ladder?

If you are early in your career, the pressure to keep your head down is intense. Jobs feel fragile and mistakes feel permanent. Plus, everyone usually tells you to be grateful, quiet, and patient.

Here is the part nobody says clearly enough - nobody is going to give you permission to be ambitious.

If you want access, you have to earn it by being useful. If you want responsibility, you have to behave responsibly before the title arrives. If you want trust, you have to show judgement before anyone is watching.

That means taking risks. Thoughtful and measured ones, but risks none the less.

It means speaking up when you have something valuable to add. Reaching out to people above you with ideas. Putting your hand up for things you are not fully ready for but are willing to work through properly.

You will get some things wrong. That is unavoidable.

The real failure is playing it so safe that nobody ever notices you were there.

Almost every industry works this way. Sport. Music. Business. Culture. Life.

Learn the rules, respect the consequences then find the space to bend them.

History is not made by people who followed instructions perfectly.

Each week I end my note with an anonymous quote from somebody in my phonebook. This weeks related quote is from a former female employee of mine, who I hired as a graduate and has gone on to head up the department of a media organisation. She says:

“Early on, I stopped waiting to be invited. I worked out where I could add value, stepped into the gaps, and trusted that if the work landed, the permission would catch up later.”

Austin

A few years ago I was invited to a charity event - one of those posh dinners where everyone is dressed impeccably, the wine is poured generously, and nobody quite tells you what they really do. Everyone does that understated British thing and only later (usually via Google) do you realise who you were actually sitting next to.

I found myself next to an older couple who, a bit like me, seemed out of place. We gravitated towards each other and got talking in the way you do at these dinners. Then the convo turned to work and the husband mentioned he worked in the household goods sector. I mentioned the company I was at (I won’t say who) and his eyes lit up - he said he had been trying to get hold of someone there for months but wasn’t getting a response.

I still had no idea who he was but he seemed like a cool guy so we exchanged details and the convo turned back to family and football. It was a good chat but being honest I thought I would never hear from him again.

A few days after the event, he emailed me from a gmail account saying he’d love to come to the office to talk more and if I was free next week, he’d fly into London on his private jet.

“eh? a private jet?”

Curiosity naturally kicked in and I Googled him. He did technically work in the household goods sector, but to say he undersold himself would be an understatement. He was the founder and owner of one of the largest household brands in Europe. They have hundreds of stores and (according to the BBC News website) was a certified billionaire. If I hadn’t met him in person I wouldn’t have believed it myself but here I suddenly was, arranging a meeting with a billionaire, just me and him on his gmail account.

At the time I chuckled to myself - here was someone with more money than most could imagine, and he was being completely ignored. It’s not that his ideas weren’t good or he wasn’t serious, he just didn’t have the right access. He had been emailing our company’s generic ‘info@‘ inbox from his personal Gmail! His name didn’t ring bells and wasn’t recognised by the people filtering emails, so it likely went to the junk folder.

We talk a lot about money, power and status, but I believe access matters most. Titles and net worth don’t automatically translate into access because relationships, more than status are what actually open doors. Name brand recognition still matters because without it, even the most successful people can end up shouting into the void.

After exchanging a few emails and texts we agreed to meet at my company’s HQ. It was a balmy hot summer day and he arrived a few minutes late. When I walked into reception to greet him, something was off immediately. He was sweating, his breathing was shallow, his face was flushed red. He looked distressed almost like he was going to collapse.

“You alright?” I asked.

“I’m a bit light headed” he said, struggling to catch his breath. “Your lift is broken and I walked up the stairs. I just need something to eat, have you got anything?”

And for reasons I still do not fully understand, the first thing that came to mind was a sandwich.

“Do you want a sandwich?” I asked.

“Yes please” he said, relief flooding his voice.

So I went into the company kitchen and said to myself “right, how do you make a sandwich for a billionaire”…I grabbed two slices of plain white bread, some ham, butter, and raided some poor colleagues lunchbox for a single leaf of lettuce. It was not impressive but it done the job.

As I started assembling it, I became aware of something else. My colleagues were watching. A few of them genuinely gasped (for context, I was known in that office for always ordering lunch. I was not a sandwich guy. So the sight of me making a sandwich seemed to break whatever version of me they had in their heads)

I finished assembling the sandwich and walked into the room to hand it to him, then stood there and watched him scoff my ham sandwich with absolute urgency. No pause. No conversation. Crumbs everywhere. Bits of ham falling off the plate onto the floor.

It was one of the most surreal and grounding things I have ever witnessed.

After he dusted himself off we talked properly. The conversation flowed. Nothing commercially came from it, but we stayed in touch, and it’s a meeting I think about often because it reminds me how thin the veneer of hierarchy really is and how quickly titles dissolve when something basic is required.

In that moment, I was not an executive and he was not a billionaire. I was just the person closest to the kitchen and he was the person who needed help.

This goes against how leadership is usually framed.

We sell leadership as elevation. As distance from the detail. As being too senior for certain tasks. As having earned the right not to do things anymore.

Real leadership is situational.

Sometimes you are the strategist. Sometimes you are the decision maker. Sometimes you are the shield. Sometimes you are the listener. Sometimes you are the person who makes the tea. Sometimes you are the person who makes a sandwich while everyone else looks on in disbelief.

The mistake most people make is assuming their role is fixed.

It is not.

Your role changes depending on the room, the moment, and the people around you.

Think about friendship groups. Every group has roles, whether anyone acknowledges them or not. There is the organiser. The designated driver. The fighter/protector. The person who always remembers birthdays. The one who diffuses tension. The one who shows up early and stays late etc.

These friendship roles are not fixed to status. The most powerful person in your office might be the least dominant person in their friendship group. Your CEO could be the quiet one who never decides where to eat. Your line manager who controls budgets at work might be the designated driver on weekends. Roles shift depending on context because power doesn’t travel with you everywhere.

Problems start when people refuse to play their role because they think its beneath them, or not aligned with how they see themselves. That way of thinking often shows up in careers such as the junior staffer who thinks certain admin tasks is “not their job, or the manager who will not cover a team mate because it feels uncomfortable or unglamorous.

I have seen situations like this play out and witnessed trust erode in rooms because someone would not step out of their self image. On the other hand I have seen authority quietly grow because someone did.

Every environment eventually presents a moment where ego is tested. Where you either cling to who you think you are, or respond to what the moment actually needs.

The strongest people do not confuse seniority with exemption. I’ve seen a senior executive get down on the floor with a junior team member after they spilled coffee over their bag, helping mop it up while the rest of the room stood there unsure what to do. I’ve watched a founder stay behind after an event to stack chairs and clear the room alongside the venue staff, while others drifted off, because the work simply needed doing.

Both show the same thing - status paused and ego parked to handle the moment.

There is a broader lesson here about life and responsibility.

You do not get to curate only the flattering parts of leadership. Sometimes the task in front of you will feel beneath your experience. That does not make it beneath you.

Sometimes the work will not match the story you tell yourself about who you are. That does not make it optional. Life does not reward self image, it rewards responsiveness.

That billionaire with the sandwich did not hesitate to accept help. He did not perform strength or pretend he was fine. He allowed himself to be human.

The lesson is simple.

You are never too senior to make someone a cup of tea.

You are never too successful to play your role in the moment you are in.

Ego does not feed relationships. Humility does.

Every week I get an anonymous quote from someone in my phonebook. Today’s quote comes from the boss of a major record label. They say:

“Every room has work that needs doing. Leadership isn’t choosing the title you like, it’s choosing the task the moment requires.”

Austin

Looking at this photo, where lane six crosses the line last by the smallest imaginable margin, I got thinking about how often careers in the creative industries are decided in exactly the same way.

In elite sport, the difference between first and last is often measured by millimetres or fractions of a second. One name (or team) gets written into history and the rest usually fade into anonymity.

That framing is comforting because it suggests that outcome links cleanly to effort and ability. In reality, that framing is a lie we tell ourselves to make sense of a chaotic system.

The Olympic sprint is one of the clearest metaphors I have seen for how careers actually play out in creative industries. Every runner in that frame is elite. Every runner trained obsessively. Every runner sacrificed something to be there, but yet only one is rewarded in a meaningful, lasting way.

By any normal human standard they succeeded, but the system only knows how to recognise one outcome.

Keeping on the sprinter theme lets take the Olympic 100 metres. We remember Usain Bolt for doing a madness in Beijing 2008 and London 2012. World records. Iconic celebrations and cultural immortality. What is rarely discussed is that the guys who finished second, third and fourth in those races ran times that, in any other era, would have made them legends. In 2012, the final again featured times that still sit near the top of the all time lists. These were not average sprinters. They were “once in a generation” athletes, yet their names are largely forgotten. The margin between immortality and obscurity was not effort, just a few hundredths of a second.

This is the part that young people are rarely prepared for when they enter the creative industry. They are taught to believe that merit is linear and progress is predictable with effort compounding cleanly into success. That if they do the right things for long enough, the outcome will take care of itself.

That’s not quite the case…

I have spent my career inside systems where outcomes matter more than process. Where intent is largely irrelevant and where context is forgotten the moment a result lands. In music, nobody asks how hard a campaign was to execute if the numbers are weak. In media, nobody asks how close something came if it did not land culturally. In business, nobody asks how many variables were outside your control if the P&L is red.

The industry rewards what happened, not what almost happened.

I have seen artists miss their moment by weeks, even when everything on paper was right. The song resonated with fans. The visual was amazing. The strategy made sense. But the market shifted, another record took the oxygen, a platform quietly changed its priorities, and the window closed. At that point, no amount of effort, belief, or late correction could reopen it.

I have seen people lose roles after delivering strong work because leadership changed and the narrative reset. I have seen careers stall because the person who believed in someone or something left the building. I have seen projects die because the timing was wrong, even though the idea was groundbreaking.

From the outside, it looks like underperformance. From the inside, it looks like reality.

This is why the sprint metaphor makes sense. In the above photo lane six did not fail because they were lazy. They failed because elite competition punishes tiny margins brutally. They were not slower in any meaningful human sense, they were just slower in a system that only recognises one outcome.

The creative industries operate a similar way, but without the clarity of a stopwatch.

There is no clean finish line. There is no objective time. There is only narrative. Narrative decides who was early and who was late. Narrative decides who was visionary and who was misguided. Narrative decides who gets remembered and who gets reframed as expendable.

Young people entering the industry often underestimate the psychological weight of this. They assume rejection is feedback. Sometimes it is but often it is circumstance. Sometimes it is structural. Sometimes it is political. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the work or person at all.

The danger is internalising every loss as a personal deficiency.

That is how talented people burn out early - they carry every near miss as shame and read every setback as proof that they are not built for this. They watch peers advance and assume there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

What they do not see is how uneven access really is.

Some people get multiple finals. Multiple attempts at glory. Multiple resets. They come from families with safety nets or have managers who insulate them from consequence (as a youngster I was lucky to benefit from the latter) They have capital, cultural or financial strength that allows them to keep running without collapse.

Others get one shot. One cycle. One window. When it closes the cost of continuing is too high. They don’t lack talent they are just in a system thats unforgiving to those without margin for error.

I tell young people this clearly. You can do everything right and still lose. That is not pessimism just realism. If that truth breaks you, then whatever industry you’re trying to get into will break you eventually.

Failure is not a sign you should stop, it’s a sign you are participating. The people who never fail are usually not aiming high enough or not close enough to anything that matters. Falling at the last hurdle is painful precisely because it means you were good enough to be in the race. That proximity hurts but also means you are closer than you think.

What matters long term is not a clean record. Its about staying in motion long enough for alignment to happen. Alignment between timing, support, taste, platform, and narrative.

Most success stories are edited to remove this complexity. They compress years of frustration into a sentence. That edit is dangerous because it creates false expectations. It convinces young people that struggle is a sign of misalignment rather than a feature of the process.

The truth is less glamorous and more useful.

The creative industry does not owe you fairness. It owes you nothing. The only leverage you have is your ability to keep learning, keep building relationships, keep sharpening your instincts, and keep yourself psychologically intact through periods where the results do not reflect the work.

I have watched people win early and collapse later because their identity was tied too tightly to external validation. I have watched others lose repeatedly and quietly build the emotional muscle that eventually carried them through when the moment arrived.

There is no moral order to this. Just patterns.

This sprint image shows effort and unfairness in the same frame. Everyone ran. Only one is celebrated. The rest disappear from the story.

If you are trying to build a career in music, media, or any competitive creative field, reject simple stories. They will mislead you.

Focus instead on staying credible, staying connected, and staying mentally flexible. Learn how to take losses without freezing. Learn how to read timing without chasing it and most importantly learn how to detach your self worth from outcomes you cannot fully control.

Success, when it comes, will not feel like justice. It will feel like alignment. A brief moment where preparation met opportunity before the window closed again.

From the outside, it will look obvious. From the inside, you will know how close you came to quitting. How many times you crossed the line and nobody noticed. How many races you ran that never made the broadcast.

The people who last are not the ones who never lose. They are the ones who understand that losing is part of staying in the race.

I end every post with an anonymous quote from somebody in my phone book - today’s quote comes from a senior female leader at a Fortune 500 company:

“Most people quit not because they lack ability, but because they mistake bad timing for bad judgement. If you don’t understand the terrain you’re operating in, you end up blaming yourself for conditions you were never in control of.”

Secondly, this is 100% ‘hand typed’ - not a single word (or ‘-’) comes from ChatGPT or any other AI model. What you’re reading is direct from my brain, with the odd Google or Wikipedia check to keep the facts straight.

If you’re here, you probably already know who I am and the journey I’ve been on. But for those who don’t: I joined the BBC aged 19 and went on to become Head of Music at BBC Radio 1Xtra, while also sitting on the Radio 1 playlist team. Between those roles, I was directly involved in deciding which artists and records broke through at national scale. From there I moved into tech, becoming Head of Music & Culture at Spotify during the period when streaming stopped being an experiment and became the default way the world consumed music, before then leading editorial at Apple Music where culture and product collided at global scale. Most recently I was a President at Warner Music in a dual role as part of the senior leadership team.

Along the way, I’ve helped break artists and influence how hundreds of millions of people discover music. I’ve also advised governments, sat on boards, invested in startups, and launched projects focused on access and fairness in the creative industries. In 2025, I was humbled to receive an OBE for services to music.

Everything that follows comes from having seen up close how power, technology and culture actually behave once they reach scale.

These posts are me thinking out loud. Sometimes I’ll post about music and media, other times about sport, parenting and tech. Maybe the odd random story from the archives. But it will all connect the dots between history, technology, culture and human behaviour. Some of it will be right. Some of it won’t. All of it is written in good faith, grounded in experience, and open to challenge.

Take what’s useful. Question the rest.

And on that note, let’s dive in.

AI Will Follow the Nuclear Path

Every once in a while, humans invent something so powerful that society collectively decides it cannot be left unchecked. In the 20th century, nuclear weapons were that invention. In the 21st, generative AI is looking like the next.

A Quick History Lesson
For most of human history, our weapons were pretty primitive – sticks, stones, spears, swords. They could kill, obviously, but nothing arrived that suddenly flipped the entire balance of power overnight. That changed around the 9th century, when some clever bastard invented gunpowder in China. Over the next few centuries, gunpowder led to cannons, firearms, and bombs. Warfare evolved, but slowly.

Then came the 20th century and everything accelerated.

By the early 1940s, the race was on to build the biggest, baddest bomb imaginable. In 1945, the United States won that race by dropping an atomic bomb on Japan, unleashing death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.

The horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced a rare moment of collective clarity. This was power we couldn’t pretend we were responsible enough to hand out freely. What’s often misunderstood is that building a nuclear bomb isn’t actually that hard. The science is well known. The hard part is getting hold of the materials. So that’s where the world focused. Supply chains were locked down. Access to key ingredients was tightly controlled. Nuclear power became something you could only touch if you were allowed to, because letting just anyone have it was clearly a terrible idea.

Parallels with AI
That nuclear lesson matters because AI is following a script we already recognise. The technology races ahead while society scrambles to catch up. Power lands before permission is asked and then guardrails come later. We’ve seen this movie before…

I love AI. I use tools like ChatGPT daily for travel planning, researching local spots, summarising documents, you name it. It’s already woven into how I think and work. The technology fascinates me but also makes me wonder - what happens when everybody has access to an insane level of power at their fingertips?

That power will enable extraordinary things. In medicine, AI will spot cancers earlier than any human doctor and accelerate drug research in life-saving ways. In creativity, it’ll help artists visualise ideas faster, prototype music and art, and remove technical barriers that kept many voices out for too long. In education, it will teach students at scale, adapt to each kid’s learning style, and help close learning gaps that schools have struggled with for decades.

Yet the same power cuts the other way. The tools that diagnose illness can also fabricate medical “evidence” indistinguishable from the real thing. The systems that help artists create can just as easily rip off their style, clone their voice, or flood the market with cheap imitations that erode the value of original work. The assistants that teach us can also manipulate us, persuading or deceiving on a massive scale.

This is the uncomfortable truth: AI raises the ceiling of what’s possible but also it lowers the floor of what’s dangerous. It amplifies good and evil intentions alike. Bullying can get more sophisticated. Scams become creepily personal. Identities are easier to steal than to protect. We’re already seeing early signs – for example, scammers using AI voice cloning to impersonate people’s grandchildren on the phone, conning pensioners into sending money . And that’s before we even talk about how these tools might be exploited by predators against children or by trolls against vulnerable members of society who don’t have the digital literacy or defences to know when they’re being misled.

So in my mind, the question becomes: who should be allowed to do what with AI, and where do we put the brakes on this?

Because right now, AI is in a honeymoon phase. The narrative is all about productivity, creativity, efficiency – all the cool and positive use cases (which do exist in abundance). But fast forward a bit. What happens when these systems consistently outperform humans at persuasion, planning, deception, optimisation? When the same tools that help a designer mock up an idea can also let an 15-year-old kid in rural Wales generate convincing deepfakes, clone a bank website, spoof a voice note from a parent, or spin up something harmful without fully understanding the consequences?The conversation will shift from “Wow, this is useful!” to “Oh no, who controls this?” – basically from tool to weapon or leverage.

I vividly remember being a kid watching BBC News report that Garry Kasparov, the world’s best chess player, had been beaten by an IBM computer. It was 1997, and most people assumed a human champion couldn’t lose to a machine at something as sophisticated as chess. Then he did lose, and it blew minds.

That defeat was monumental because something we thought was uniquely human suddenly wasn’t. From that point on, the question stopped being “can a computer do this?” and became “what happens when they do this everywhere else?”

We already live with answer to that question…we routinely limit technologies because letting everyone use their full power would be dangerous.

Cars are the simplest example.

Even the cheapest oldest car can be modified to hit 150 mph with relatively minor changes. The engines can handle it. The materials exist. The physics works.

But we deliberately do not allow that.

We add speed limiters, regulate engines and design constraints into the system on purpose. Not because we cannot go faster. Because we do not trust ourselves if everyone can.

My belief is the same principle will apply to AI.

There will be a moment. It might arrive after a scandal, a crash, or a near miss that never quite makes the headlines. Or it might arrive quietly, through policy papers, procurement rules, and decisions taken behind closed doors. But it will arrive.

When it does, countries won’t ban AI but they will draw lines.

Limits on how powerful these systems are allowed to become.

Limits on who is allowed to build and train them.

Limits on where they can be used and what they can be used for.

Some of those limits will be public. Most won’t be.

There’s a comforting belief that AI will remain open and decentralised forever. History suggests otherwise. When a technology starts to shape power rather than productivity, access narrows. Control centralises. Guardrails appear.

High end AI will be licensed. The hardware and power needed to train AI will be controlled. The physical tools needed to build and run powerful AI won’t be freely available. These systems won’t disappear, but they’ll sit behind walls.

When the nuclear age arrived, the world didn’t suddenly become wise overnight. It stumbled, scared itself, and then put rules in place. AI will follow the same pattern. Not because we’re afraid of progress, but because we’ve seen what happens when power runs ahead of judgment. History doesn’t punish innovation. It punishes a lack of restraint.

I’m going to try and end every post with an anonymous quote from somebody in my phone book - today’s quote comes from the UK Head of a global media company. Their thoughts are: “The mistake people are making is assuming AI will be governed like software. It won’t. It’ll be governed like energy or weapons. Quiet rules, hard limits, and a lot of decisions that never make it into press releases.”

Austin

PS - a quick note on AI’s impact on the creative industries. AI can help creators move faster, see further and experiment more freely. It can lower barriers and unlock voices that would never have been heard. That’s the upside and it’s real. But it doesn’t replace the spark. The thing that makes an idea resonate is still human judgement, lived experience, taste, risk and intent. AI can amplify that spark. It can’t generate it from nothing. The danger isn’t AI helping creators. The danger is pretending that creation and replication are the same thing. If we get this wrong, the creative industries don’t disappear overnight but value drops and trust degrades. Audiences stop knowing what’s real, artists lose control of their own likeness, and economics tilt towards scale over originality. If we get it right, AI becomes infrastructure and an amazing tool. Lets see how it plays out.

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