Why, as a Music Producer, did I decide to write a book?
The book's only just come out, so I haven't had this question thrown at me a hundred times yet. But I imagine it's coming: "Why does a DJ and electronic dance music producer write a novel?"
The honest answer really is that the book is the music career. It is another song to me or another DJ mix. It's just been told with words instead of sounds.
Living through the era change
Part of what makes this hard to talk about is that the ground shifted under the whole industry while I was learning to walk within it.
I grew up on the tail end of Top of the Pops and CDs, an era with a fairly simple pitch: work hard enough at your craft and you'd get there. Then streaming and social media took over, and that pitch quietly changed without anyone announcing it. Suddenly it wasn't just about the music, and it was about the algorithm. Attention and likes started dictating how tracks got made, structured, and released, before a single fan had actually heard them. And just as everyone was getting their head around making music for the algorithm, AI music turned up out of nowhere and changed the terms again.
So when I talk about the economics or the mental health of people within the industry, I'm not describing one fixed set of rules. I'm describing three different games I've tried and failed to learn back-to-back, each with its own idea of what "making it" even means.
The economics of it all
Let's start with the bit everyone skips over when they talk about "chasing your dream."
I've been DJing since my teens. I've been lucky enough to play across the UK and Europe. I've got a first-class degree in Digital Music. I’ve had several projects over the years, including one in particular, Balance Beta, that recently passed two million streams across all platforms. On paper, that's a great career and a successful one. In reality, two million streams buys you a nice bit of pride and not much else.
Nobody tells you that when you're sixteen and dreaming only about decks, clubs, parties and studios. They show you the headline slot, not the maths. The maths is: streaming pays fractions of a penny, gig fees for anyone outside the top tier are small and inconsistent, and the gear, studio time, and travel to actually make and play the music cost real money every single month. You can be genuinely good too, and good enough that rooms full of strangers dance to your tracks and still not be able to pay rent from it.
That's not a failure of talent. It's just what the industry actually is, underneath the Instagram reels. It’s still great to see people make it their full time job though I must say.
Why so many successful producers have a second job
This is the part that surprised me most once I was inside the dream rather than looking up at it. The producers people listen to every day, even the ones with releases on the labels you respect. Many of them are teaching, working agency jobs, doing session work, or building something else entirely on the side.
Ok, so it's not exactly a dirty secret anymore. It's just not the story anyone wants to tell, because it complicates the myth. The industry runs on an enormous base of people who love the craft enough to subsidise it themselves, indefinitely, with other work. I've done that myself; I currently work in marketing by day and teach DJing and production at BAD Studios, alongside my productions. Neither of those things makes me less of a producer, though. If anything, understanding that this is normal, rather than a personal shortfall, would have saved me years of feeling like I was a failure.
What it does to your head
Nobody plans for the mental health side of it either.
Chasing any creative career means constantly measuring yourself against people who look, from the outside, as if they've cracked the code. Every unreleased track or unfinished 16-bar loop feels like evidence against you. Every gig that doesn't lead anywhere feels like a verdict. And because your whole identity is wrapped up in being "a music producer", any professional setback lands like a personal one against your art.
I went through periods where the gap between how I wanted things to look and how they actually were became genuinely hard to carry. That's a big part of what's in the book because I think it's more common than the industry lets on, and more useful to talk about than to perform.
The bit that's true
None of this is me saying don't do it. The freedom and sense of purpose are real things. Some of the best moments of my life have come from a gig or a studio session that went somewhere I didn't expect, and I mean that both physically and mentally. That side of chasing this dream isn't a lie; it's just not the whole picture, and I think people deserve the whole picture before they hand years of their life to it.
That's really why I wrote the book. Not to warn people off making music, but to write the version of this world I actually lived in. The economics, the many jobs, the mental toll, and the freedom, all in the same story, because that's how it actually comes as a package. I couldn't find that book when I needed it. So I wrote it instead.
Inside the Mindset of a Shit Music Producer is out now.
