A decade ago I was an artist pursuing an aesthetic dream. Then I ran into problems I wanted to fix. That was the beginning of my dual life as an artist/entrepreneur.
I started writing this on the plane back from Eurosonic, a festival and conference in the Netherlands where music bookers make their picks for who’s going to play at this year’s festivals around Europe. I was presenting my new startup Endlesss.fm to the conference’s new music tech section. 10 years ago I came to Eurosonic to play a showcase as an emerging artist. I’d recently signed to Warp records and was promoting the live show for my new album Listening Tree. Back then I was clearly an artist first and foremost. Then my passion for tech took over…
I’ve been interested in music technology for over 2 decades in parallel to my interest in music. I first started to mess around programming my own sound toys as a creative pursuit. I wasn’t trying to solve problems with the technology I was making, I just felt that the available tools were too limiting to my artistic expression. I was looking for new worlds, the pot of gold at the end of my imagination (which isn’t really there… this if the that keeps artists striving so beautifully).
But in the last decade since my showcase at Eurosonic in 2009 my relationship to technology has evolved beyond the purely artistic. Having netted a golden opportunity to take my artistic career to the next level I was hit with a big empty ‘now what?’. By the end of 2010 I was burned out from touring, isolated from my social sphere by my almost-permanent absence from home. I was fed up with the way the music industry operated, with how I’d lost touch with the raw spontaneous creativity I enjoyed when I first got into making music.
This was a turning point. Until then my ambitions had been to express my aesthetic fantasies to the world — the archetypal artistic pursuit — but now I had a problem and I wanted to fix it. This is the key difference between the artistic and entrepreneurial mindsets.
Artistry starts with a dream, entrepreneurship starts with a problem.
I wanted to find a way of approaching musical creativity that bypassed all the stuff I didn’t like about working in the music industry, the things were making me disconnected and unhappy.
- long periods alone in a dark studio perfecting tracks
- waiting for months for my records to come out
- having to tour all the time to promote them
- the large gulf between ‘artists’ and ‘fans’
Becoming focussed on a problem and its solutions was a turning point. It made me lift my head up and look around rather than dive ever deeper into my inner world which I could no longer rely on as my sole source of creative guidance and happiness. I now wanted to make an impact on the world by solving problems for myself and other people rather than just selling my artistic vision.
My first attempts at working this way were pretty clunky and mostly involved solutions that only really worked for me. Initially I wanted to transform the music industry into an improvisation-first world by becoming an improvising-only artist and inspiring everyone else to join in. Fairly delusional! It was another artistic vision — but as I pursued it, talking about it at conferences, vlogging, persuading agents, festivals and clubs to book an artist who hadn’t made a record in the last 5 years, I learned about my folly. I didn’t have my head up to see what the real problems were in the world. All I needed to do was ask people “would you like become a live-improvising artist?” and I would have learned very quickly that very few people actually want to do this!
Since then I’ve slowly begun to understand that really solving real problems involves constantly asking real people the right questions. It involves looking out when I want to look in and learning all the time. This doesn’t come naturally to me. My default position is to spin into an excited vortex around my dreams and hope to pull other people into that energy. I don’t think this fundamental tendency of mine will change in this lifetime and nor do I want it to as it’s a great motivator to set out on a path of discovery. But the artistic urge will only take me the first few steps. Very quickly after the initial inspiration I’ve learned that I have to get out of my own way and start asking questions if I want to be in with a chance of creating real value in the world.
3 years ago I founded Endlesss which is now my main focus. Like everything I’ve ever done it started with a dream but it very quickly became about asking questions, identifying problems I hadn’t even thought of and learning… a monumentally humbling amount of learning. So far it’s been a beautiful journey at the border between looking in and looking out — and as we approach our soft launch in the next few months I’m sure even more opportunities to learn will show up.
Endlesss.fm is a virtual place for spontaneous collaborative music-making. We’re soft-launching soon. Sign up at Endlesss.fm Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook
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