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References

Footman, E. (2015 ) About: Erika Footman. London: The Institute of Contemporary Music Performance.

N/A. (2024) Mark Richardson (musician). San Francisco: Wikipedia.

N/A. (2024) Gabrielle Aplin. San Francisco: Wikipedia.

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Introduction

This blog will be focused around certain individuals’ journeys in the music industry and my personal take on how it relates to mine. I will be researching five guests and putting my findings here.

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Gabrielle Aplin

Gabrielle Aplin is an English singer-songwriter who began her career as a professional writing and touring musician on YouTube where she uploaded videos of acoustic covers. She built her following over time until February 2012 when she signed a record deal with Parlophone and began recording and releasing her music officially, through them. She rose to prominence the following November when she was chosen to record the music for a John Lewis advert. She did a cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love”. Her version reached number one on the UK Singles Chart.

The next year in May, she released her debut album “English Rain” which reached number two on the Album chart. This led to more singles including “Please Don’t Say You Love Me”, “Panic Cord”, “Home” and “Salvation”. “English Rain” has sold over 100,000 copies. She released her second album, “Light Up the Dark” in September 2015, her third, “Dear Happy” in January 2020 and her fourth, “Phosphorescent” was released in January 2023. She has also released multiple EPs throughout her career.

Gabrielle gave us some advice for songwriting and getting into the industry as a songwriter:

-Find what you like and take inspiration from it so that you can have a better chance of liking what you make and therefore, you’ll be more enthusiastic about it.

-Put yourself out there and work with the people around you. Go to open mic nights and smaller, more relaxed gigs with opportunities to speak to people and make yourself known. Start with people you know and work your way up to sending emails and things. She said, “The industry is so saturated these days that a human connection is really important”.

-Write down whatever comes into your head, whether that’s musically or lyrically.

-When writing for someone else, always ask what they want from you. You can give advice but don’t overstep the line. It’s also important to know when the writer/musician relationship isn’t working but this comes with time and experience.

Accessibility in the music industry

Gabrielle told us that she thinks the music industry has the potential to be more accessible but that it’s not quite there yet. She said that in her experience at Parlophone, most of the people on her team were “white lads from very wealthy backgrounds” highlighting that it’s important to make sure that everyone has the same opportunity. She said that, as someone from a working class background, she “didn’t realise how rare it was for (her) to have the success that (she) had”. This experience made a part of her want to hide and pretend to be posh as well but she has since realised that it’s very important to be yourself and she told us this as a piece of advice.

I think Gabrielle’s experience is, again, one that resonates with me as an aspiring artist. Maybe not on the songwriting side of things (in terms of writing for other people, although this would potentially be an option for me) but as a performing artist, her story is quite inspiring with her sudden success regarding the John Lewis advert at such a young age.

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Charlie Pinder

Charlie Pinder is a music publisher and A&R man currently based in North London. He has worked at Warner Brothers, Sony, Kassner Music, Music Management, Reverb and Reservoir. He went to the first ever  music business course in Bathgate, near Edinburgh, in 1991 where they held a lot of guest lectures. Charlie instinctively knew that the way forward would be to speak to these people and get their details so he can contact them later. One of them asked him to help out at their place of work which led to him getting a job as an A&R scout. This is where his career really began.

Charlie ended up managing the Scottish rock band Travis who were prevalent in the Glasgow music scene at the time. He told us that there were things he didn’t like about their band and that he was quite brutal to them about it saying, “I said what I thought” and, “It was useful for them to hear why they’re not getting signed” but that later they “appreciated (his) honesty”. Under Charlie’s management, Travis released their first single “All I want to do is rock” which charted in the UK at number 36 in 1997. He was made the managing director of Sony publishing at a young age and eventually made his way up to being the CEO.

While he was working at Sony he signed artists like The Vines, Oasis, KT Tunstall and Everything but the Girl.

He experienced his first major blow in 2005 when he was fired from Sony. He told us that he was happy it happened in a way because “those are the moments that almost define us more than anything”. After this he started running a management company, at which he worked most notably with Olafur Arnalds, an Icelandic neo classical composer who was at the very start of his career. Charlie managed him through everything he did, from live work to film scoring. Charlie told us that management is really hard but “it’s the best way of learning about everything; you’re right at the centre of it all”. After this he got back into A&R, started going to gigs again in the hopes of finding another opportunity. After one of these gigs, he went to the pub where he bumped into Alex Kassner, the son of the owner of Kassner Music who he knew from his Sony days. This led to him doing consultancy for them.

Charlie then began working at Reservoir which he has been at for a while now. One of his big rules is to have the whole team in the office as much as possible. He gave us his reasoning for this, “I don’t think a team, particularly a creative team can build working remotely”. He said, “There are bits of it that you miss”.

I think A&R might be something I’d be interested in potentially getting into in the future so it was nice to hear about Charlie’s experiences in his line of work and how he’s dealt with certain things that cropped up along the way.

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Oliver Baldwin

Oliver Baldwin is a freelance audio engineer and dubbing mixer from Bristol. He has worked with many big names in the current industry including PJ Harvery, Aldous Harding, Black Country, New Road and Dry Cleaning. As a dubbing mixer, he has worked on a number of nature documentaries, most notably the planet earth series.

Oliver told us how he got into his line of work. In 2013, in his first year of uni, he messaged every attainable studio in Bristol, J & J studio got back to him and he became an intern there. He ended up working on an album with Gordon Raphael, the producer for The Strokes and Regina Spektor.

He said, “Mentorship is the best education you could possibly get. I learned more from (Gordon) in the two weeks that we spent together, arguably more than in the first three months of uni”. He then continued through with bigger opportunities and worked as the lead engineer with local bristol bands.

Oliver said that in his line of work, you can’t really plan for much because you don’t know what you’re going to be provided to work with so you just have to go with it. As an example of this, he referenced when he mixed Black Country, New Road’s latest album “Live at Bush Hall”. He said to us, “The recordings were so bad that there was a part of me that thought I need to send this back because I can’t mix this”. He told us that despite setbacks like the drum sound being a spill from the vocal mic, he still did it because the band clearly trusted him to get the job done so he kept faith in himself and powered through. My take from this is, it doesn’t matter what you’re given, just at least try and make it work because you never know what might be particularly beneficial for you.

A piece of advice that he gave to us is that part time day jobs are very important because they take a bit of pressure off of your music making by allowing you to take more time with your work and be more selective with what work you take on as well as alleviating the entire responsibility of sustaining you on something that you love because that will make you hate it. He also recommended that, when you’re writing, instead of thinking about musical references, think about scenes in films. He said this is a helpful method of songwriting because it means you’ll have less chance of sounding too much like other artists. He said by doing this you’ll be “describing a palette” as opposed to trying to replicate a specific sound.

Oliver’s journey is one that encourages me to get my head down and put the work in to get to where I want to be, although his career path is not the same as mine, the sentiments can be applied.

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Erika Footman and Mark Richardson

Mark is the touring drummer for Glastonbury headlining and multi platinum winning band Skunk Anansie and formerly with other successful UK rock bands Little Angels and Feeder.

He is a co-founder of the charity, Music Support. The charity helps musicians tackle their struggles with addiction and emotional or mental health issues and, having suffered with his mental health himself, this is a very meaningful pursuit for him. Mark was also involved in Children in Need’s 24 hour drumathon which raised £3,601,138.

Erika’s shows always have an interactive aspect as she has always been interested in the connectivity of music and the power it has to unite large groups of people. She took a literal stance on this when she created her own unique musical instrument by connecting the rope from a kimono to an analogue synthesiser. During a performance at Stockwell Playhouse, she held the rope out to each side of the audience and got everyone to hold hands, essentially making the audience part of the instrument which I think is pretty amazing. She also designed a giant pom pom that’s connected to a wiimote which had been hacked to turn it into a midi trigger. The pom pom is then thrown out into the audience, sending signals to the synth to make sounds, this time making the audience part of the band.

Like I said in his intro paragraph, Mark has toured with multiple successful bands, including Skunk Anansie, our very own Jim’s Little Angels and Feeder. However, he has had the most success with Skunk, with hits like “Hedonism” and “Weak”. They’ve played support shows across the globe with many notable names including Lenny Kravitz, Therapy? and Rammstein. His industry success doesn’t stop there though. He has also had prolific work as a session drummer for Steve Robson, Sunna, Amy Macdonald, Globus, Ace’s solo project, Skin’s solo project, Mel B and Erika.

Now I’d like to talk more about his work with Music Support. The charity was founded in 2015 by Mark, Johan Sorensen, Andy Franks and Matt Thomas, spurred on by the deaths of Amy Winehouse and some good friends. Mark said, “When I tried to get sober in 2000, any information on how to achieve that was rare and hard sought. Almost 60% of entertainment industry workers have sought help for mental health issues and 40% of those have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness. So myself, Johan, Andy and Matt created Music Support. The charity is a non-profit collective of volunteers and professionals providing help and support to individuals in any area of the music industry suffering from addiction, emotional or mental health issues.”

I find both Erika and Mark’s stories to be very uplifting and inspiring with both of their touring successes, Erika’s deep insight on the community spirit of music and Mark’s charity work.

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Pritt

Pritt is a successful R&B artist and radio presenter currently based in south London. She has been releasing music full time for seven years and in 2022 she had a Tik Tok go viral which boosted her career and helped her become an internet sensation. Her ethnic roots as Eelam Tamil influence her art greatly, allowing for a compelling and unique sound.

Let’s start by talking about her viral video. The video itself is a celebration of reaching one million streams on her cover of “Unakkul Naane” and features snippets of her and her family celebrating and dancing with balloons while the song plays in the background. I thought this was very sweet because in her talk she said that her Dad in particular wasn’t sure that this was the right career path for her but he can be seen smiling and taking part in the celebrations alongside Pritt and her Mum.

A portion, but of course not all, of her success is due to her social media prowess, particularly on Tik Tok and YouTube.  A concept that comes into play here is Audience Control which refers to the viewers’ role in determining which pieces of content gain traction on Pritt’s platforms and how it’s impossible to predict which. In this case it was her “thank you for one million streams” which boosted the song to 50 million streams in the space of six months. Pritt describes this sudden surge as “not fun at all but it was a good flex”, with her success, despite the downs that came with it, propelling her forward into a pool of opportunity.

Although the audience controls what is popular initially, after the creator’s platform gets moving, the control evolves and settles into the creator’s hands. In other words, it’s now up to them to maintain the viewers’ attention and keep them coming back for more.

This takes us nicely to what I'd like to talk about next. Pritt’s post viral successes as a touring artist and radio presenter. She has been enjoying an action packed and fruitful career for some time now with her most recent gigs at the Queen Elizabeth hall in London and Dialled In festival in Manchester. She also played at The Great Escape and Reading festival in 2023. As of January 2021, Pritt has been one of 8 Future Sounds artists for the BBC Asian Network and is the first Tamil woman to do so. This laid the foundations for her radio show on the same network where she hosts interviews, curates playlists and plays music by other South Asian artists to provide recognition on this half of the globe. She has also been featured in multiple fashion media publications, these being GQ, GUAP, Pop SUGAR, Clash Magazine, Trench Magazine and EAR MILK. She has even worked with gigantic brands such as Nike, Adidas, Apple, Mix Cloud, Pirate studios, PUMA, Levi’s, Kurt Geiger and more. 

I think Pritt seems really cool and down to earth and I find her very inspiring as a performing musician myself.

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