Find Your Frequency

Sissy Ford moved to London from a Cambridgeshire village with no contacts in the industry, and when we recorded, her independent single Bite the Bullet had just passed 400K streams. In this short episode she's honest about signing a distribution deal and expecting a team to do the rest, and about what actually changed when she locked in on content herself. She explains why she'd tell her y...

nnabel Stop It went from DJing on Twitch in her bedroom to playing Tomorrowland, and she's one of the most honest guests we've had about what that journey costs. In this short episode she explains why getting your finances steady comes first, and how a cycle of busy summers and quiet winters kept undoing her progress. She talks through going full-time the first time with no strategy and no...

Eden J Howells spent years chasing goals they couldn’t control: a manager, a booking agent, an editorial playlist, a follower count. In this episode they explain why they now set goals around only what they can do, and why the song you’re most scared to write is usually the one that connects. As someone who runs a social media agency, they’re frank about why they wouldn’t recommend a small artist...

Vinyl is the biggest income False Idah makes from music right now, and she’s blunt about what streaming pays. Jay has been a rock band singer in Northampton, a signed pop artist and Amaroun, and the fans she built along the way followed her over to her latest project. She explains how TikTok lives where viewers help write the songs built that loyalty, why her mailing list matters more to her than...

Katie Debrah spent years in creative strategy at Google and YouTube, including two years with YouTube Music in LA, and now runs the creative tech company Halo and Echo. In this short episode she takes on the question labels bring to her more than any other, which is how content actually drives streams. She explains how an artist can have a million followers and 10,000 monthly streams, and why chop...

Matt Spetzler has spent the last decade investing in music, with around $5bn of deals behind him. In this short episode, taken from our full conversation, he does the maths on what a loyal fanbase is actually worth and explains why 10,000 to 100,000 fans who stick around can give you a real career. He talks through why owning your work is the closest thing an artist has to a retirement plan, and w...

DJ Semtex has been the voice of hip-hop in this country for 30 years. He gave Drake his first UK interview in Hyde Park before anyone knew the name, he's been credited by Kanye and a long line of UK artists, and he's spent two decades spotting talent before the rest of the world catches up. In this episode he cuts through the noise with the bluntest, most useful advice you'll hear on this show: ma...

EKENE grew up in Lagos on gospel music and choir, moved through rap groups and poetry, and started sharing songs on Instagram because they needed somewhere to go. His debut EP Little Us is seven songs of genuinely honest writing, and this conversation catches him right at the start, which is the most interesting place to have it. He gets specific on why he measures progress by knowing his fans&#39...

Rob Sealy spent 30 years in insurance and financial services before he noticed something the music industry does that no other industry would tolerate: artists barely know who their fans are. So he co-founded Openstage to fix it, and now runs fan campaigns for some of the biggest artists alive. In this episode he gets specific on why your social reach has collapsed below 2%, why 10% of your fans d...

Sissy Ford moved to London on her own at seventeen and has spent six years turning bedroom recordings into a catalogue with millions of streams. She's breaking right now, and this conversation catches her mid-climb, which is exactly the most honest place to have it. She gets specific on why nothing in music happens quickly, why comparing your streams to everyone else's is a trap, why picki...

Nicola Gunby is a two-time founder who built and sold a beauty marketplace before she turned thirty, then set out to fix a problem she couldn't shake... how hard it is to actually meet people and build real community in a city full of strangers. That became Cliq. In this episode she gets specific on why your fifty thousand followers aren't a community, why most people quit building one rig...

Katie Debrah started exactly where a lot of you are now. Making music, uploading it, hoping someone on the other side of a screen would care. She ended up on the inside, spending years at Google and YouTube shaping creative strategy for some of the biggest artists in the world, before walking away to build tools for independent artists instead. In this episode she gets specific on why a million fo...

Keith Jopling has spent 25 years inside the music industry: IFPI, Sony, EMI, Spotify, MIDiA Research, sitting in the boardrooms and reading the data. He's the host of The Art of Longevity (80 episodes and counting) and the author of a new book, Riding the Rollercoaster, built from those conversations. His argument is blunt: the business is built on artists' work but run largely for everyon...

David Ronan is the founder of RoEx, which builds tools that give artists the confidence to release their music: corrective mixing, mastering and audio cleanup that clears the technical hurdles so you can focus on the creative part. He's got a PhD in music tech, was head of research at AI Music (the company Apple later acquired), and RoEx has now processed over 6 million tracks. In this episode...

Max Busin is the founder of GoToBeat, the live music company on track for half a million tickets this year across 16 European countries. His pitch to artists is a simple one: tour with us and earn around 40% more than you would with a traditional promoter. In this episode he breaks down how that number works (lower costs, smarter data, the right rooms), why most artists quietly lose money on tour,...

Maria Stavrou has been an optical engineer, a circus aerialist on three world tours, a therapist, and a festival producer. She's visited 52 countries and built everything from cabaret shows to 15,000-person events. The thread through all of it? Creating spaces where people feel safe enough to be themselves. In this episode, Maria talks about how growing up in foster care pushed her to map out a 20...

Lizzie Esau has gone from open mics in the Northeast to Radio One's Big Weekend and Glastonbury. No label. No viral moment. No shortcut. Just great music, relentless live shows, and zero-hour jobs to keep it all going. In this episode, Lizzie talks about why she built her career on stage rather than on a screen (and why most of her community found her through live, not social), the preparation rit...

Ibrahim Kamara gave Nines, Brent Faiyaz, and J Hus their first ever magazine covers. He built Guap, one of the UK's most influential creative platforms, from a camera and a student overdraft. It took six years before the business made any money. Now, 11 years in, he's going back to his first love: making music independently. In this episode, Ibrahim breaks down the independent artist model...

Chris Herbert put together the Spice Girls when everyone around him was telling him to make another boy band. He looked at the market, saw it was saturated, and went the other direction. He cast them like a TV show (Friends, specifically), giving each member an individual identity so the audience had someone to identify with. It became one of the biggest bets in music history. In this episode, Chr...

Alex Brees has watched 200,000 artists sign up to un:hurd. He's seen what the ones who grow do differently from the ones who stay invisible. In this episode, he gets out of the interviewer's chair and answers questions directly from the community. Alex breaks down why playlisting is only part of the strategy and what artists should be doing alongside it, the three things that separate arti...

Matt Spetzler has closed over $5bn of music deals including Kobalt and Native Instruments. He now runs his own fund backing independent music companies. He's seen how the money flows from every angle, and he says most artists are missing it. In this episode, Matt breaks down exactly where independent artists are losing money they don't know about (publishing alone is an extra 20%), why cha...

Josh Denzel went from a recruitment job he hated to presenting for the BBC, Sky, Amazon, and Netflix with over a million followers. He started by filming on Snapchat for seven people. Nobody handed him a microphone. He just picked up his phone. In this episode, Josh talks to Alex Brees about why consistency is the hardest part and he still struggles with it, the Nike video that hit a million views...

Fraser T. Smith has produced some of the most important records in British music. Gang Signs and Prayer with Stormzy. Set Fire to the Rain with Adele. Psychodrama with Dave. Black at the Brits. A Grammy, multiple Ivor Novellos, and a career that spans from Craig David to Kano to Celine Dion. In this special episode recorded live at SXSW London, Fraser talks to Alex Brees about what every great art...

ANNABEL STOP IT had already tried to make it in music once. Community radio in Brixton. A show on Radar Radio. She gave it everything, couldn't pay her rent, and walked away. Took a 9-to-5. Put the DJ dream in a drawer. Then during lockdown, she set up a Twitch stream in the corner of a shop with no plan and started playing for whoever would listen. Six-hour sets. Chat room regulars. No strate...