PB002 - How Did I Get Here?

Listen while you read

By coincidence, this week is exactly 10 years since I put my first songs on Spotify, here’s a song from that EP, made with my friend Tim Blazdell whilst living in Baku. _{Songs are embedded if you read online.}

What’s this post all about?

In my last post, I tried to give a sense of what this project is about: a general dissatisfaction with the way we’ve come to consume music - how the design of platforms is shaping the way we engage with music and impacting our lives beyond. In future posts, I’m going to add a lot more detail to this picture, zooming in on different areas: the impact of playlists, social media as marketing, music production influencers. I’ll use my experience of making music as the vehicle to carry us through.

How is my individual experience important?

I believe the problems of capitalism cannot be understood only by looking at economic structures - those structures are made up of individuals. People make and listen to music because of instinctive emotional desires and responses. Capitalism has co-opted, distorted, and commodified those responses - but they’re still there, living underneath it all, sustaining the whole system.

A small number of global companies make vast sums of money because they know people have a need to consume music, but also that people have a need to create music. These companies have learned to expertly prey on that psychology.

So this is my attempt to outline some of those impulses in me - to give an insight into the beginnings of my music, but also to start to illustrate how the proliferation of independent music has fundamentally changed the economics of the music industry.

Why I Started Making Music

I first started making electronic music in 2014, in an effort to better understand what I was listening to - musically and sonically. That year I moved to Baku, Azerbaijan, working on an opening ceremony. In the early months, I had free time and no friends outside of work, so I decided to buy a MIDI keyboard and Ableton. I met Tim, who taught me to use drum machines and synths. We jammed, and he helped me turn some ideas I had for songs into the EP linked at the top.

But looking back at this time, there was something else going on: I was infatuated with someone and mistakenly believed that becoming proficient at making electronic music could - or should - be a way to establish a romantic connection with this person. It’s plausible that this was the real driving force for initially learning how to use all this stuff and how to put songs together.

Interlude

When I returned to London, I more or less stopped making finished songs for a few years. A chaotic period occurred. My guitar was destroyed.

One important thing to come out of this period was a realisation / belief that to avoid further chaos, I needed to foster creativity within myself, rather than seeing myself as stable-but-boring and attaching myself to people I saw as the opposite.

Try Again

After my guitar was restored in a monumental act of love by an old friend, Matt, I slowly started to record stuff again.

The next time I published a set of finished songs was in 2021 - six years since the first. I found this surprisingly difficult. I had recorded and produced the entire thing. I felt like I was asking people to adjust their image of me, from someone who’s good at maths to someone who makes music. I was convinced this was something I needed to do, but was still - on some level - terrified of being seen as delusional or inauthentic.

As absurd as it might sound, the act of putting my music on Spotify, and its reception, felt inseparably tangled with all sorts of ideas of identity: moving away from some things, moving toward others. These feelings are managable, but very real, cannot be rationalised away, and provide enough purchase for cynical companies to grab on to.

This context - of people’s music being inseparable from emotions - hopefully hints at how the music’s ‘success’ can outweigh the need for it to be financially viable. With a bit of encouragement to see this financial loss as an ‘investment’, the economic system around streaming platforms can position itself differently from the record companies it replaced. Rather than a middleman buying a product off musicians, packaging it and selling it on to listeners, it is an infrastructure layer - a marketplace; advertising to and charging listeners for the music, but also advertising to and charging music-makers for the tools, services, and ‘space’ needed to create and distribute their music.

Why I’m Still Making Music

On one level, it’s just good to have a project. As someone fast approaching 40, who’s opted not to prioritise their career or have children, making music is simply a healthy way to spend time. It fills my evenings with meaning and takes up space that drinking would otherwise flood into. This was especially true in the years when I travelled a lot for work.

But mostly, I enjoy the process. I enjoy exploring what I can and can’t do, and watching that change over time - the ongoing cycle of putting in effort, seeing progress, and deciding where to go next.

Why I Promote My Music

There is not a single part of me that envisages - or desires - reaching a point where music could financially support me. Nor do I expect any level of critical acclaim. But I do feel a consistent need to publicise it in some way. Why is that?

Some of it is surely that half of the adverts targeted at me try to make me believe I should promote my music and that I should buy something off them to make that happen.

Some of it is a deep-seated desire for words of affirmation. Any psychometric test I’ve ever done has instructed managers that the best way to keep me motivated is by telling me I’ve done a good job. This is a longing that I mostly subdue, but it persists.

Some of it is simply that I have put a lot of time, energy, and thought into my music, and I feel a bit stupid when no one listens to it.

Either way, this is definitely an area where multiple sub-industries are aware of my emotional entanglement with my music and doing everything they can to convert that into sales.

^{A song from my first release under the name Personal Best.}

Why I’ve Written All This

Firstly, I wanted to be clear that I’m not doing this to make money - and that my situation isn’t unusual. If I were trying to earn a living from music, I’d be more compelled to play along with the standard modes of promotion: TikTok, playlist pitching, paid ads. But I’m not. Like millions of others, I’m paying to do this, not being paid. Figures are murky, but in 2024, over 2 million new artists uploaded music to Spotify, joining the existing 10 million; only 225,000 earned more than $1,000.
That means somewhere between 90% and 99% of active artists on Spotify are like me: driven by something that is not money.

Secondly, to make clear that the music industry is different to others. It’s fuelled by messier and more powerful drivers: love, sorrow, a search for meaning or status. And that’s precisely what the industry has learned to exploit.

This context is important. If you looked at everything I’m going to describe through the lens of a small business, it might seem straightforward - a series of rational decisions aimed at growth or return on investment. But that’s not what’s happening. For whatever reason, I know I’m spending money, time, and effort that I know I won’t get back, so the question of what, or how much, to spend has no obvious answer. Which is how I’ve ended up here.

The Next Best Thing

This week, I’ve finished mixing and mastering two versions of the same song, A River, and wrestled with what to do with them. My friend Jon sent me a full live drum kit, four sax parts, and three trumpet parts. The final result is massive - it sounds amazing - but it strays from some core ideas/energies that I’m always trying to maintain in my music. Either way, these are done, and in the next week I’m going to be sending them out to some DJs and blogs in advance of releasing them at the end of July. This is new for me— I’m not especially hopeful, but I want to try. If anyone has some connects/suggestions, get in touch.

I spent some time recording percussion parts for a couple of songs that will be following behind, A Flower and [as yet untitled]. Finally, I came on holiday, and the house I stayed in had a kalimba, so I recorded another part for A Flower.

Please Share 🙏 (if you want to)

I’d love my music - and writing - to get to the people who will get something from it. So if you like the music, please just save it and listen to it again, maybe listen to some more. If there is someone you know who you think will enjoy it, please take a moment to write to them and pass it on. Do this for other music too, not just mine.

Free Palestine.
Speak soon,
PB x