How to Start a DIY Music Business Before You Feel Ready - Girls Twiddling Knobs on Mission Driven Music Careers

0:04How do you build an independent music business? And I don't mean an entire industry. I mean your own DIY project. How do you turn that passion and spark for music into something which grows into your job? It could be, as Mary Spender said in the last episode, converting some of that 100 million views on YouTube into 30, 40 ,000 record sales and lots of Patreons and ticket sales and all these other things that you can get once you've built an audience, created a mailing list and developed a parasocial depth of connection. I'd recommend going back and listening to that episode if you've not heard it yet.

0:47But for this episode, I'd like to introduce you to someone called Isabel who runs Girls Twiddling Knobs. This interview took place a couple of years ago and it didn't quite fit with any of the themes for the podcast seasons. And then I realised it fits with all of the themes because what Isabel has done is create a mission-driven rather than money-focused business. She has turned her love of recording, engineering, mixing and creating spaces for women to thrive into an academy and a training organisation and a series of projects and podcasts and all sorts of things. Like Isabel's one of the most inspiring people I follow online and I'm quite happy to say that I find her so fascinating in the way in which she can turn something as simple as a little course they're running for field recording into these little moments of intrigue and excitement and curiosity and it makes me wish I could go on the course because it seems great and this conversation really neatly follows on really from my conversation with Mary Spender and talking about purpose and to talk about how when you've got such a large audience converting it into something else but But actually, DIY, small independent businesses, people that have come from the art world, don't need giant reach.

2:16They need great ideas. This is my conversation with Isabel, and unlike the rest of this season where we are looking at the future of music, this one is very much about looking for its moral compass. There's lots of conversations about production and sound and all sorts of geekery like that. Hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did having it.

2:39I guess the best place to start is by introducing yourself in the multitude of things that you've done and do. So my name's Isabel. I started as a singer-songwriter. I mean, musician, I think that's a difficult divide that there is. But yeah, I write songs and I started in music by writing songs, singing songs, but also playing the clarinet and being in the wind ensemble and all that stuff. I then went on to to cut a long story short ended up living in London doing lots of gigs not getting anywhere but being really interested in more kind of experimental areas of music always have been which then led me into doing an MA in Sonic Arts at Belfast's Sonic Arts Research Centre um actually and that's a very random kind of uh change I guess but I got a scholarship to go there so um that's what kind of brought me there and then I really um fell in love with sound on an even deeper level and it's Sonic Arts is that like is like you just you study like Delia Derbyshire and like yeah and we didn't study Delia Derbyshire but which you know we can talk about that of course but we but I mean really it's it's the aesthetics of sound so and that takes you all the way through from the the actual physics of how do you synthesize sound all the way through to how do you create an immersive sound installation to how do you create immersive game environments um how do you uh capture field recordings you know lots lots of things how do You compose with sound as a almost a sculptural material.

4:23So, yeah, it's just the aesthetics of sound, basically, and all of its different applications. Note to the listeners, I did have to check that my sound was OK before we've begun for these very reasons. But the thing is, is that I, I mean, and we can talk about this a little bit as well, but I'm neurodiverse. I can be very slapdash about my approach to these things and I have to really kind of sit myself down. and I've had to learn to really sit myself down and become more of a perfectionist about these things. And so I feel like I've got, I hope I've got a healthy balance of on the one hand, really appreciating sound, but not being massively, you know, anal about it.

5:01Well, that's interesting because we met through Catherine, the anchoress, who you've been doing some teaching courses for women in studios with. Is it called the Culture of Belonging? Is that the name? Yeah. And I think she's the opposite. it she's she's it's so funny she's like the mirror of you because i think perfectionism in her production comes first a lot of the time well it's so funny because katherine is autistic and i'm dyslexic i i have very highly suspicious um i'm very suspicious that i may all be also be adhd um and we have the opposite neurodiverse kind of behaviors or or preferences as well so So where Catherine would, again, like Catherine would be quite kind of anxious about future scenarios that may crop up.

5:47Whereas I'm like, well, CrossFit wouldn't come to it, you know. But also Catherine, you know, they were really complimentary in lots of ways as well, because Catherine, like you say, would be incredibly fastidious about certain details to do with production. Whereas I'm really good at being able to describe the big picture and also being able to describe quite complex processes to other people. um so we were we were a good match but it was very funny the way that our neurodiversity intersected it was just so different um so yeah I think I hope that I've got a kind of healthy balance there because I know that people can be incredibly kind of anal and geeky about these things and I think that it's important to have a healthy balance and I think that's what's led me to what I do now so to cut a long story short you know I ended up getting a PhD in sonic arts I specialized in field recording, electroacoustic composition, voice and kind of ways of manipulating voice and then went on to found the female DOI musician and that has become a resource and a platform and a business which helps women learn to record and produce their music but not in the kind of standard way that's been done before um it's it's really profiling things like artistry community and respect at the the center of everything all of that including my podcast the girls twiddling knobs podcast um but also that thank you um but also that it profiles all the work that i do profiles this sense of um experimentation and play and and integrates things like soundscape composition and field recording and some of those pioneers like Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram so that it's not just about becoming a bedroom producer that's going to make sick beats and sell them online because there's loads of places that you can learn to do that and it's not anything against that but it's just to say well actually in this online space there's a lot of room for more considered nuanced approaches that you may only find in certain degrees even or you know that kind of more um slightly more academic but in no way elitist and trying to bring that to people who maybe haven't had the opportunity to explore that yet so that's kind of where I'm coming from which is interesting because I think the things that I've the reasons why I started to love record production was those details it's the ad libs on a beastie boys record or it's the which I don't which I guess in terms of a cityscape is sound is like field recording in a city isn't it sometimes um and things like loads of floods records like his production on some of the sounds on the nine inch nails records there's just like all these textures and it's not a surprise that trent resner went into film composition because i think that the the immersiveness of the detail and the subtle things and the like static of the room and all those different things like they are the idea they were playing like horror movie vhs is but some of that's being picked up on the mic this like really low frequency and things and because I think the detail of sound and I and it's interesting because when I came up with Drowning Sound I was only 16 and I came up with the name and I didn't think about how important sound was to me so it's kind of a good that I came up with something that stands the test of time yeah it really has stood the test of time so it's a great name you know and and and it just evokes so much i think so many people can relate to that idea of being drowned in sound and i mean it was emo i was very emo i had to have death in the the specter of what i came up with um yeah which which brings us on to what we discussed today because um we had about 20 different options of things we could discuss i think the really central one is you talked about it being a mission driven business um and i always think purpose is the most important thing to any project so many other people put profit first and i've my brain doesn't work like that um whereabouts what's the origin story i quite like that the like superhero origin story what was your um spider in the nuclear waste yeah okay yeah so i think that um it's an amalgamation of these different experiences over the years.

10:16I think growing up, I was very aware that as a woman in music, I mean, growing up in the nineties and the noughties, especially, I was very aware that to be a woman in music meant that you really only had a very narrow kind of identity that you could fit into. And otherwise you were just not going to have a career. And even the musicians that I could see who were successful, who were, you know, apparently quite alternative, like Bjork or PJ harvey um they were still operating very much in that that um narrow framework as in they were very thin very photogenic um they had you know a big team of men around them and um and it just felt like it was really hard to have a career as a woman if you were not going to be that um and that's not to belittle what those women have contributed to the music industry at all and that they've done incredible things but it's just if you grow up and you're you know a broad-shouldered slightly dumpy ginger person for example you might look at that.

11:26I thought you were describing me for a second but I'm not ginger it's blonde but it might be the camera. Yeah well I'm sure a lot of the listeners are nodding their heads, but that's most people, you know. And, um, and I remember at 16 kind of putting on a bit of weight and thinking, oh crap, like this, this is really gonna mean I can't do this career, which is just bonkers when you think about other career avenues. And, um, but that was just really obvious to me. And that when I was even in bands, um, it was just the classic stuff, you know, just even as a musician, I would not be taken as seriously, or I would be, people would want to wrap me in cotton wool because they'd be so there'd just be this idea that because I was the only woman in the band something awful was going to happen and therefore they had to be the knight in shiny armor it just it never felt like I could just have a kind of normal relationship and that's not to say that those people were in the wrong it's like it's true that that music is very flawed in that sense and there are genuine risks or there are genuine differences if you're a woman or non-binary but that was just a very kind of formative experience that I just soaked up everywhere I went every every artist I saw on TV every experience I had at a gig it just all kind of accumulated and then when I went to uni and and I loved the the music undergrad I did I went to Dartington College of Arts and it was fantastic and I did a um an elective in Sonic Arts I was really lucky that they did that at undergrad level but again I kind of started to notice oh this in the studio environment in the small music tech environment suddenly I'm hugely in the minority here and I'm hugely in the minority that I would I would have an interest in this and then I would even have the guts to pursue that you know and then doing the MA and doing the PhD again I was just always one of one woman in the room maybe two women in the room um there were certain things I was interested in that just weren't valued very much in those spaces sometimes and I think that's changing and it's changed quite a lot but any anything that I did where I showed some kind of interest in the the visual aesthetic or the human interaction with what I was doing was belittled or seen as extra or an add-on whereas to me I thought well no this is going to hugely change how someone interacts with the sound or interacts with this as a piece of technology or whatever it might be like this is as important and so it was all those kind of tropes that just kept building up not to mention conversations I had with say I remember being called in for a meeting with an A &R guy I thought we were meeting this is such a classic you know I thought we were meeting to talk about maybe him booking me for some gigs that's what I initially emailed him about but because he heard my music he decided he wanted to sign me to a record deal, called me in, didn't even say, by the way, I've decided I'd quite like to talk about this thing.

14:19He just started talking about it as if I'd immediately be just grateful that he'd consider me. I was very confused and I was like, oh, okay, this is a kind of curveball. And then he started doing the whole kind of take you down to make you think you need me type thing where he was like, right, well, you know, obviously we can't market you for your looks and kind of looked me up and down because, you know, we'll have to just market you on the the quality of your music. It's like a form of professional negging, isn't it? Oh yeah, definitely. It's just, you start seeing it again and again and you realise that it's replicated in coercive controlling relationships and all that stuff.

14:53And then he said, you see, the way I see you, Isabella, is you're like a piece of meat that just hasn't been cooked yet. And I can cook you. And you just think, wow, I cannot believe we're having this conversation. And I just instantly didn't respect him at all. But I can see how if you were a younger woman and you were maybe a slightly different personality and you dream of being a piece of meat yeah yeah you might interpret it differently but for me in that scenario i almost laughed i was like wow and i said well look i'm going back to finish my phd and then he was like well why would you do that we're going to put you in the room with with some amazing producers and you know just this incredible attitude that because basically because i had a vagina but i i didn't have the right physique or face yeah yeah how does that change how you play an instrument or use a mixing desk or yeah just you know all of these assumptions and all this way of talking to me just that you know was it was really shocking to me you know and the closer as whenever I've got close to that part of the industry I've always run a mile and it's meant that I have definitely missed out on a lot of opportunities that other people have gone with but then I've seen a lot of women get burned and it's just this really difficult you don't really have a good option you know you either say no to people like that and miss out on opportunities or you say yes to people like that and then get burned in the process and really have some quite traumatic experiences potentially so so that that's that as well but I also kind of um just saw this massive gap in the things that I loved about music technology being so hard to access unless you had incredible resilience and staying power especially as a woman and the amount of internal gymnastics you had to go through in your mind about feeling worthy enough feeling good enough being a being able to be in the room as the only woman all the time you know to actually access all that incredible amazing information and skill and creativity that's there in sound and music production.

17:04It was just so, that's so gatekeeped and so, so much of a barrier there. So I just saw this massive gap of there's so many women who are really interested in those slightly more, you know, experimental aspects of music production. They're a great gateway into women producing more, but they're so difficult to access both because you mainly only come across them in really good quality academic environments or even if you get in the room you so many women drop out or don't engage to the level that they could do because there just is a lack of inclusion there not to um sound like I've been in a marketing meeting but was it a bit like taking back control because if you consider that for a long time studios required obviously a lot of resource like often that was resource controlled by men or budgets controlled by men um I mean I tried to make a playlist once upon a time of records produced by women and trying to find many things pre-1990 was quite hard yeah apart from the kind of Delia Derbyshire's and Daphne Orams and yeah um by discovering that Joan Jett produced Bikini kills um rebel girl like which i didn't realize no i didn't know that and like obviously looking through some of the producers that prince worked with i guess they were slightly more engineers than producers because i doubt he would give them full credit but um yeah and i think you start to realize that like there aren't many examples um but i was just thinking in terms of that moment when home computing and I spoke to St Vincent once and she talked to me about when she was like 14 driving to some like big like Walmart or something to buy her first piece of computer software so she could start recording and like how empowering that was to begin to learn and not have to do things on other people's terms I think it's such a key part of how the industry's changed and but we are at a point where there's 100 000 tracks coming out every week and i'd assume the majority of those are still people going into either a studio environment with a friend that's got a computer and some mics which again is potentially not a safe space because it's like the modern equivalent of going around some weird photographer's house to get your pitch is taken or it's people learning for themselves and um i can see as a business opportunity as well as a empowering resource like i can see how the um venn diagram makes sense and not in the kind of succession sub stack meets master class um as a business model like i can see that it was really obvious in hindsight to start building the business that you've been building So do you want to tell me a bit about how you got started with it?

20:04Yeah, and I feel like actually, just to give some more context as well, that the other reason I started it was actually came from a question of how can I help more women release music? So my first step was actually just setting up a free Facebook group, which I called the Female DOI Musician Tribe at the time. And it was just me really testing out what is this thing that I want to do? And at the start, I thought I just wanted to do, be an online resource that would just be giving lots of women lots of different tools about being a DIY musician. So everything from releasing through to songwriting.

20:39And then that became clear that that was just too wide. And I think I remember putting out like a kind of a coaching kind of offer and it didn't convert into sales and it was hugely undervalued. And there's loads we can talk about with like starting a business and your self-worth and the relationship there. But it was hugely undervalued and it just wasn't sustainable. And then I kind of started having to really think, right, how do I get really specific and intentional about what this business is and who it serves? And so I did loads and loads of calls with people in my community. I would speak to people on the phone and say, look, if I was to do this kind of course, what would you think about that?

21:25Or what's the biggest reason you haven't released your music? Because for me, that was the core aim was to get more women releasing music and to improve those metrics so that women were having bigger presence. Because so much of the time, you'd always hear this sense of, well, we'd love to put women for festivals, but there aren't as many artists. or we'd love to include a woman on our, you know, like you were saying, Sean, like best produced music of the last whatever years, but women aren't producing music. And then there'd always be that thing, but women don't want to, obviously, because they could if they wanted to, it's a free country.

21:57And then I would always be like, yeah, but it's not as simple as that. You know, why on earth would 50 % of the country not be doing this stuff just because they didn't want to. It just, it doesn't make any sense because also of knowing the women I know and the conversations that you have behind the scenes. So I just felt like I really want to help women actually record and release their music. But when I had those conversations with people from my community, it was the recording aspect that was holding them back. And they would say, I'd love to do a course with you about releasing, Isabel. Because obviously I've got those Spotify streams that makes me a very compelling leader you know of how do you how do you release your work as a diy woman in music but when i spoke to people the thing that was really holding them back was that they didn't have any recordings and that they'd maybe been trying to record their music for free with a friend for years or they'd gone into a studio and spent thousands of pounds felt really ignored in the whole process and came out with recordings they didn't even feel like they were their own and didn't want to release because they felt ashamed of the process even or the outcome were trying to record something that was very personal intimate and the engineer didn't realize the mic was on whilst making a filthy comment about them not not to not to directly name any names but i sat in the room whilst that happened and i suggested we cancelled the rest of the session um it was awful and i honestly didn't i didn't know that the artist heard it on them on the in their headphones in the other room um which then turned which then in a way turned into the recording itself has now got that laced in it for the artist and it's like to think that a studio should be a space where you have to be open and vulnerable and the psychology of being in a studio is so important to capturing yeah and obviously at great expense yes yeah you've paid for the privilege to be degraded like that it's sick you know i hope that guy was sacked I don't know what happened the um yeah um anyway I distracted from the point but I think it's a key one because I think I'm privileged to have been like witness to um those conversations with lots of women in the industry um based on the artists I've worked with and different people who feel comfortable speaking to me and I think a lot of men in the industry don't necessarily get exposed to how awful the industry is that they work in and are complicit into keeping as a kind of awful place um so i think what what were the barriers that the artist was saying they had and then what was i guess when if someone signed up for your course what would be some of the first things they'd start to learn so one of the biggest things that holds lots of women back is self-doubt and a fear of messing up a fear of adhering to a stereotype of not being very good with technology because they're a woman um also just massive overwhelm at everything they have to learn which has been reinforced by mansplaining and patronising when they've tried to do a little bit and then someone said, ah, but you didn't do this properly and you could have done that and you didn't do this and, oh, you're using that microphone.

25:08Well, that's not good enough at all. And you have to have multiple microphones that's positioned in multiple directions. And it's all of that just reinforces. And meanwhile, here's a January Johnson record recorded on a dictaphone. Yes. I mean, it's bollocks. It's all bollocks. And it just depends on what's your intended outcome? How do you like working? and what kind of emotion and atmosphere you try and embed in your recording because you could record something on a phone and it could be beautiful but then I guess this is where my background in in slightly more experimental production comes in that I'm not rigid in that in that way of thinking you know but it made me see that there needed to be a music production course that was totally redesigned and so with Home Recording Academy which is my kind of signature course.

25:55I have a couple of other courses that are sort of smaller courses, but in HRA, the very first module is all about mindset. So before we get into anything to do with technology, everyone goes through a module which is identifying maybe stories or beliefs that they have both about themselves and about music technology in general, and really unpicking where have those stories started and those beliefs started. And then we move into how you're going to sit with that, but go through home recording academy and not let them derail you. And we write a course promise and it's much more touchy feely. It's stuff you'd never get in a music production course at all.

26:34But a lot of men will be listening to this conversation right now, Sean, I'm sure, and thinking that sounds fucking awesome. It's not just women who respond to that and want that and need that. But the vast majority of women, that's one of the big things that's holding them back because they'll immediately get their hands on that technology and immediately all of that self-doubt will creep in. And that sense of I don't know what I'm doing I'm an imposter I should have left it to an expert what an idiot I am this is never going to work so with HRA we just face that head on right from the start Home Recording Academy sorry yeah so with Home Recording Academy we face that that's the first thing we do the next module is all to do with listening so again it's like really getting into how do we listen to music how do we listen beyond melody and and lyrics and chord structures even and how do we start to see recordings as whole worlds of sound and so again it's like really getting into the kind of the the intricacies and getting away from the formulaic approach to bedroom production so it's also that like finding what you love like for instance i didn't think i liked art galleries because i don't like the vast majority of art in them it's like but all you're seeing is the cold play of history you're not you're not seeing like the first time I saw Francis Bacon I was like ah okay and then I saw some Jenny Savile and I was like well this has got the same visceral feeling as some of the music I love it makes sense that I'd love this and I think learning sorry I'm I am I'm not meaning to mansplain what you just said but that that sense of learning what you love about production I think it's really interesting the artists I've worked with know exactly what they want to sound like and yes and often that's the production from a track it's not this they don't want a song that sounds like it yeah it's been one thing that's been quite interesting recently is this artist called Timra Timra and like four artists I I know all women all absolutely love his records because and it's the sound and the textures of them that that he's just like they don't sound that dissimilar to the arctic monkeys in places or the walkman or some records like that it's just been really interesting that one artist has recurringly come up and he's tiny really in terms of the grand scheme of things but his records have just got this great vibe and i think the kills come up a lot because of that because jamie's production's got that static and texture and and grit to it whilst also sounding like full-on party tune some of the time and and it's just drum machine and a guitar almost on a lot of it um anyway that's a distraction but i think it's that the art of learning how to listen and to figure out what you like i i'd assume that would be the bit where i'd be like can i sign up now because i just want to like better learn all that stuff yeah well i think that's the thing is that's the other that's the other issue that a lot of women come across is that no one's ever asked them to have an opinion on what they want their recording to sound like because it's just presumed they're not interested or they can't cope with it or they don't know enough and so that second module in hra is really important because it's like right we're going to learn how to listen to production like a producer and and i then very instinct intentionally ask them what do you like i have a playlist that we listen to all different types of female artists tracks and different genres and i'm like i want you to write down what do you like what do you not like don't worry like you're not going to offend anyone they're not going to hear you just own it um what what do you still have questions over and then they identify their sonic signature that they're working towards with their own recording and it's exactly that it's so important to you don't have to it doesn't have to be fixed forever but to have that confidence of conviction and that's another thing that really holds so many women back and also that a lot of women do have that those ideas and those opinions like you're saying sean but they don't realize that that's them starting that journey of production because that is at the bottom line, that's what a producer does.

30:39You don't have to touch any equipment to be a producer. You have to have a vision that you carry forward and then you deliver that vision in the recording. And I think that's one of the, like we could have done a whole episode on what production is. And I would more than happy come back and do that at some other point. But that sense of like the engineer is the person that makes sure the mic sounds right or sounds like not right because often it's not about it sounding right. it's about sounding like what the artist envisions um yeah and obviously some of that can be done in post and like if you're recording in your own room then obviously you're limited to what you can do but if you are going to go into a studio and essentially commission the engineers and potentially a producer or a co-producer to work with you on the record knowing what you want being able to kind of a be it against the record you think sound great seems really key to me from the artists i've worked with um like i know with the anchoress like on one of the first things katherine recorded she was like this blonde redhead track this m83 track the feeling of this interpol record the music she was making didn't sound like it but she knew where she wanted the bass to be she knew where she wanted the scope of the track to be which meant that when the mixes were coming back she was like that's not that's not what i meant this is what i meant um and i think sometimes you don't you can't hear and envisage it in your head until you've heard it but i i often think how different the history of music would be if it wasn't artists being told what they were meant to sound like and i know a couple of quite big artists have told me they were forced to put on not just clothing that they didn't feel fit but sounds and productions and they had a whole idea of what they wanted to be as an artist and a label decided what they should be as an artist and that was yeah like the history of music if there's not been as many successes it's been because men have tried to turn women into what they think they should be and not allowed them to be the artists they believe they should be and I think and I guess in terms of a purpose-driven business it's that purpose-driven production like understanding that it serves the song that it serves the lyrics that it serves the the sonic I love that term sonic signature in the kind of sonic world of the music um so that's the first two bits yeah so I won't go through the whole course but like hopefully it gives people an idea of the fact that it's really subverting the traditional music tech learning model it's also embedding community as part of that so people have 10 weeks access to a community of just other women going through the course they have live contact with me so they can ask me questions and every question is is you know acceptable there's never any patronizing never any judgment so all of that is like hugely different to a lot of traditional music tech spaces um and and i i'm happy to leave it there because i know there's other things that we could talk about about the behind the scenes what it's like for me as someone running that business and the the challenges i've had and the great things as well i'm not too sure how we'll tackle this but i guess it would be useful for you to talk through some of the things that you've learned um i've instantly wrote down when you talked when you said earlier about self-worth because like i find it really hard to put a price on things like i do consultancy stuff and i kind of know what my day rate would be for some things and i often feel like am i am i pushing it um yeah so so maybe that that's a good place maybe the price is not the best place to start but maybe we should start there with what you meant by that well yeah do you know what so like i'll be really candid and open in this conversation you know and that's just my kind of modus operandi for better or worse but so right now like what I'm so so the first let me take go back so female the female do I musician has been operating since 2018 it's been properly my full-time gig since 2020 and I now have a team of people around me.

34:37And so we take on a year by year basis, we will take six figures, five to six figures on a year by year basis. Now that does not mean that that's in my bank account. That just means that it's, it's been a startup that's been successful. And now I'm in a phase where I'm trying to make it sustainable and scalable and not absolutely burn me out. Again, that, that word burnout and I think that's really important to say because I think yeah so many people see income and revenue and don't understand the costs involved exactly and I think that like one of the key things I'm trying to do with this podcast in general is people to appreciate and value things yeah because I think in a world where someone thinks they're entitled to music for free and the worst of which are tech startups that don't understand why they should pay songwriters and things like that it's like why should i worry about performance royalties like twitch currently owned by amazon does not pay if your song is played on a twitch stream even though amazon have very deep pockets um anyway that's an aside but i think the value of something um is is not just the time involved but there's other costs involved um and it's like You would love to work for five days for free and someone else pay your rent.

35:57But yeah, yeah, that's we're all swimming in the same system, you know, and I want the business that I have to be a great place to work for my team as well. You know, and I think that it's been really important for me as I've built out a team. I have three people that work with me as at the moment subcontractors. I'm working to be in a position where I can permanently employ people and I'm nearly there. but I have a fantastic person called Francesca who she manages my communities with me and the social media aspect of what I do I have another fantastic team member called Rosie who helps me with the content creation and marketing aspects of what I do and then I have Jade who helps me on the Girls Fridling Ops podcast setting up interviews and editing episodes and all that kind of stuff as well so I have a team that I've built around me now whereas I just have sleep deprivation yes and i still have sleep deprivation so so my my really candid sort of point that i want to make is that you know that there's been a period of time where it's been hustle hustle hustle hustle hustle i haven't done any music that time to speak of because it's so much work and i'll get someone listening to this you don't have to do what i've done you know like i've done a big kind of it's a big deal like it's been a lot of work i have different ways that people can work with me.

37:16I have communities that have thousands of people in them. Like you don't have to do what I've done, but just to kind of be really candid, it's been a lot of work. And I've now got to the point where I'm reevaluating how I, how I assess the success of the business. And what happened last week was I was like, I have to, I have to start working like I'm a normal fucking person. I have to stop working in the evenings and I have to stop working at weekends and that will be really hard for me but I have to start make measuring the success of the business on my well-being and my spare time as much as any kind of income or profitability and I was thinking how different the industry would be um I'm talking about the online business industry but I think it equates to music as well if we all decided that we were going to pay ourselves the same let's say everyone decided they were going to pay themselves 25 000 pounds a year i know yeah but we measured and this is of course there'd be loads of reasons why this is not viable but we measured our success on how little we worked imagine how different i mean i do have a copy of the four hour work week that i've never actually read because i've never actually found the time you haven't had the time yeah but it really just thinking about it like that made me start thinking okay I that that is as important you know and I really had got to a point where I had headaches all the time but I think the beauty of having your own business even if that means self-employed as well is that you can you can take a look at that and say wow this has to change and then you can change it and I think actually like one of the the great things about purpose-driven business is you've got something to be driven towards but it can pull you and make you feel guilty a lot of the time of oh yeah and also that thing of when people understand the purpose they sort of expected it for free like I wasted a lot of time giving advice for free like um to go and speaking at events for free or because I was like well it's really important I do this thing and it's like but even even the things that feel like activism need to have like at some point this podcast will have ads and it will and it will hopefully pay for me to do it half a day a week a day a week and there will be people that that bitch and whine about that and you have to be okay with that i'm i'm both of my fingers are in the air all the time yeah that's great but that's that's the self-worth thing you know because i think coming back to the self-worth thing i've kind of realized as i've gone i've kind of adulted very much as a business owner and it's been really really hard to see people's reactions to certain decisions I've made or even you know that this whole kind of freebie culture that is in music because I think musicians are so badly treated when it comes to the value of their work they'll often then undervalue the work that other people do for them and I think you can probably recognize this Sean as a manager as well that there'll be a lot of artists that will grumble about a manager taking a cut and you're like well they are actually doing something yeah like i that you're not doing i've got some conversations coming up of just like well i should really be taking a cut of that like yeah and and but for instance there's been things like record labels asking for cuts of band camp friday releases and things like that's not really on because that was sort of done as like a fundraiser thing it wasn't it wasn't their copyright but you can start to see with certain things where the industry has because it's fragmented it does make some of those things harder but like for instance a while back I helped set up a company called Fluence and it came out of a conversation with a friend of mine of basically the time it takes to go through all the music in my inbox and to give an artist actually really want feedback they're not that bothered about the coverage they just want to feel heard and they want to know well you weren't the work right person to send it to who was um yeah and then we started to put like a small fee on for your time it was like less than a price of a pint for me to listen to a four minute song and give you feedback suggest people to send stuff to um and I think that the kickback of this is now paid to play it's like well no this was paying me for the 10-15 minutes I spent with your music that is basically going to pay for my charity donation to get into reading festival to work whilst i'm at reading festival it's like 30 or 40 quid it's the reality behind the scenes and that's the thing is that i think as a business owner i've had to really learn to accept that most people will not realize the reality of behind the scenes of what i do and um it runs all the way through from random people that i meet who hear what i've done So just to give people a sense, Home Recording Academy has had over 500 women go through it now.

42:18And Girls Twiddling Knobs is in over 80 episodes now. There's 10 ,000 people on our Instagram page. There's 10 ,000 people on our email list. It's grown to quite a big thing, a slightly big thing. If you put them all in one room, it'd be quite wanting to speak to them. Yes, it would. Yeah. And it takes a lot of time. So this runs all the way through from people that I meet in the industry, whatever, who are like really surprised I do this full time, but they have no idea of what it means to actually run an online business in the way that I do, all the way through to people who are pissed off that I'm charging 27 quid for five whole days of training with me, you know?

42:56And I have had to learn to just know that just because somebody doesn't think that's fair because they are basically operating from a place of ignorance does not mean I have to listen to them and therefore readjust my boundaries and lower my my worth basically because at the end of the day in that moment it may feel like a small thing but over time it accumulates and then if you want to grow what you're doing so that you are in a position where you don't have to be in every day and you can have a team that you really value working with and you can actually make a difference to many many more people in music you have to have those boundaries and you have to accept that you've made a decision, you thought about it, you considered it, and that decision is the right one for you.

43:43And that's the bottom line. And I think that's been what it still is that one of the hardest things of what I do. And I think being kind of conditioned in music to do so much for free, it's been a massive learning curve to then start a business where you just can't do that anymore. Because otherwise, it none of it works, you know, none of it works. Because if I'm going to do what I do I can't have another job you know there's no way just I would just have to fold it it's also the time and energy you focus on something like one of the things I've been struggling with for the last because I'm doing management starting this label starting this podcast and doing consultancy for companies it's like the amount of bandwidth you have in your brain to do the one thing that you're good at really well like for instance I know that I didn't need to prep that much for this podcast because I've spent the last 20 years of my life doing similar things so I don't have to prep for it as much but yeah like there's other interviews I've done where I've like interviewed Tamsin yesterday about her book on mental health and so I felt bad I hadn't read the book but I have experienced all the things the book's about so I didn't feel as guilty about it but really like I listen to podcasts like I listen to Ezra Klein all the time and he's read the person's book and read their previous book and I'm like that's because that's his job to go sit in a coffee shop and read them and it's like the um and I'm sure the New York Times compensates him very well for doing that as do the advertisers sponsoring the podcast anyway um exactly and that's the thing is that it's having that reality check of if you want to be in that position there's lots of things you're going to have boundaries you're going to have to have boundaries over and that other people are not going to respect and that doesn't mean that they're wrong as in the boundaries are wrong they are wrong the boundaries are always very wrong and that's possibly one of the that's almost a full circle from where we started of why you started this yeah um i'm conscious that we've been talking for a while now um and i feel like there's a lot in everything you've said which hopefully will empower people to go out and create something that sits with their purpose and value and concepts um and wouldn't it be amazing if there was that like minimum wage for a startup person that everyone can have so they can just get on and do a project like i that that concept of like i joked about socialism because obviously in an ideal world that would be um like my favorite thing about going to cuba when when i was younger which i was very lucky that i managed to be able to afford to do that but um i met the former culture secretary of cuba who'd put on the manic street preachers and simply read and all these other concerts there um and the the one thing i took away apart from the fact he was a really inspiring guy now makes documentaries somewhere in Florida and like he wanted me to send him books because he was writing a book about John Lennon and conspiracies around all of that and I didn't really think about the fact that for him it was nearly a year's salary for one book from Amazon but the one thing I took away from it was that musicians and doctors were the only people in Cuba that got paid more because they improve the quality of life and it was such a powerful thing to think even within like the socialist kind of system that you were allowed a second job as a musician yeah and that that was really because that was important to the culture and society and I think we've got everything really wrong in terms of where music is and how it's valued and how the there was something you said a minute ago that really reminded me of something which I think it feels like a good point to end on which was around the idea of value and what people expect to get for free obviously we've gone through a decade or more of exposure and attention being the thing that people are trying to game for and to give stuff away to get growth but someone once told me and and it and it actually it felt so much more vivid having experienced it but it was people value things if they've paid for it and we used to do these free shows at noticill arts club on a saturday afternoon um and it was odd sometimes it was rammed and sometimes it but hardly anyone was there and the gigs where hardly anyone was there was because it was a big name um like guillemots one of their early shows was for us people didn't come because they thought it would be too busy they wouldn't get in and they waste their time queuing up outside was actually when I asked people why they didn't come they're like oh yeah it was Saturday afternoon I didn't want to not get in but if they'd been able to buy a ticket they would have been there so we started doing guest list shows and just charging three pounds for the guest list so that people felt like they guaranteed entry and they valued it and they didn't not turn up and but I put a show on again this week and it was free entry because it was in like a members club it was a little celebration the label starting and there was 70 people on the list we expected 10 not to turn up I think 15 people didn't turn up um but in any other gig you would have expected all 70 people to turn up um and I think that idea of valuing something works both ways because I think as a consumer there's definitely stuff I've bookmarked that I want to get around to that I wouldn't but when I had a trial of masterclass which I knew was expensive I've watched like a ton of things you'd like who wouldn't want to sit and watch David Lynch talk about filmmaking and St Vincent talk about playing guitar even though I can't play guitar um and it was like that thing of valuing something because it has a price I think is really important yeah um so yeah I guess is there anything else just in summary just like little things that you think people should kind of walk away with scribble down when they do have that idea they want to do or the idea they've been sitting on that they've not quite started doing what are the kind of like a few little notes for them yeah so the first thing I want to say is that I know I'm mindful that I said that I haven't made any music for years I've made a bit I've made any music for years I just want to reiterate that that does not have to be how this works and that there were, you know, lots of things that were going on outside of this burnout for one that meant I really wanted to step away from music.

49:55I really wanted to. So that was very complimentary for the way I set up my business. But the beauty of having your own business, even if it's a side hustle, is you can then restructure it. And that's what I'm doing right now so that I can claw back some days a week to start doing music again. So I just want to make sure that's really clear. I don't want to put anyone off, you know, so you can design this how you want. um the second thing I'd say is yeah coming back to that kind of mission driven idea I think it's really important that if you set something up where you want it to be a business it's not just going to be a passion or a hobby it's a business so therefore where's the gap that you see and maybe like me you have a really personal experience of being a particular person in music for example and you can see how there just weren't resources that were helping you succeed in the way that they could have been and that you can see ways to do things differently that would plug that gap so for example you know you might be a musician listening who has adhd and maybe for you music theory was a nightmare because of that maybe there's different ways you can teach music theory because you're also passionate about music theory and you could find new ways to teach musicians with ADHD how to thrive in music theory you know you also just made me think about Laura Mary from Bloodbred Shoes who started selling guitar straps because she couldn't find any she thought was cool enough yeah exactly exactly so I think it's always like that you have a wealth of information that maybe you haven't been tuned into in that way it's just been a frustration but tune into it and think could I have I got something to offer here that would help other musicians that it always has to come to come from a place of helping other musicians it it's can't or it cannot just come from a selfish place of you'd like a bit more money or you'd like a bit more you'd like to work from home or whatever all of that stuff is great but it does have to come from a place as well as how can I help other musicians in the industry or people who want to get into music who aren't in the industry yet what where's that gap that you can provide something that disrupts what's already there that does things differently and that's where a business can be really good as opposed to a charity you can be disruptive you can make really on the on the cuff decisions and restructure things really quickly and respond really quickly and agilely so that you can do things differently um and so i think that that's a big takeaway i'd say is just to reflect on where are those frustrations where are those niggles is there a gap you can fill there and do something differently and to remember that um you may be thinking well who am i to do that but also why not you you know that's the other thing to be thinking about because that that will come up for a lot of people listening to this i think well i i could do that that thing that's in my head but who am i to do that i don't have enough experience as long as you've got 10 percent the 10 edge on the people that you could teach then you're the right person and i had loads of doubts and also like if you don't know how to do it you know how to use google and i think like there's a new generation where that is so much more part of i mean that's i'm often on youtube tutorials doing the most menial tasks in life but I think that ability to look stuff up literally you can ask chat gpt half the questions half the time now you won't always get the right answer but I think that sense of if you are one of the experts in gothic country music and you realize there is not a blog out there or a club night for that and it's a new emerging movement and lots of other people that were into the same sorts of things as you and you know all those people in that network then you are best placed to start that radio show or put a compilation out or like so I think people sometimes forget that their expertise and their position is so key and crucial um so yeah I I hope I hope that one day we're going to get a strange email from someone going I listened to your podcast like three years ago and my new business is uh yeah yeah because I think what coming back to the beginning Sean of when we're saying this is a reality now for anyone who wants to make music their full-time gig this is a reality you cannot avoid this having multiple revenue streams some of which will be a very kind of standard business model that's a reality so I think embracing that now will really help you stand the test of time as a musician over the next couple of decades and beyond and I think yeah just being ready to fail, being ready to not get things right.

54:34Oh yeah and starting before you feel ready. You are not going to ever be ready to do this and when I started The Female Do-I Musician I was nowhere near ready. I had no idea. I was an idiot when it came to business. I was so green, so green and I had all these doubts about whether I was the right person to do this. I've never self-identified as this kind of music tech expert. It just happens to have been a part of my art artistry and my friends would say well that's why you're exactly the right person to do this because you get how your audience are feeling you know so i would just say don't don't wait until you're ready um just be prepared to fail and learn but also just know that this is now a reality of new new contemporary music careers so embrace it flipped imposter syndrome on its head and turned it into a business yes basically that was too long didn't read summary of this podcast yeah exactly well thank you so much for your time as well oh it's a pleasure sean thanks for having me on did you notice which c word came up once again in that episode yes it was the word community i think that is going to be the recurring theme from every episode in this series community is where the future is bringing people together creating these spaces where we can collectivize and bring shared knowledge together it's what we've always done throughout history so it makes sense that humanity would decide that the future is going to be similar to our past and perhaps our more distant past and i think with the rise of ai we are going to see a lot more human focused, human centered projects.

56:21And community is such a great way of doing that, bringing people together around a shared interest, a shared passion, a shared vision, a shared project. That to me feels like such a huge thing. I really love how Isabel talked about her business in that conversation. And I think if I was to be making a podcast, it was like Diary of a CEO, all about how people run their businesses. These are the kind of businesses I would want to hear about and talk to. I think that there is something in the creation and construction of a project. Being able to envisage it but then to also be able to build it is such a big task and I know that I've done it myself and I know that it's not something that's small, it's not something which you just get on with and it happens.

57:04There are so many dead ends, so many boring bits of paperwork so many things where you find yourself looking up the most banal information in order just to complete a really basic task and none of that stuff really gets talked about and I'm glad we didn't talk about in this episode because it would have been pretty dull but I think that anyone that achieves anything there is so much that you don't see and I'm really grateful to Isabel for talking so candidly and openly with you and with me about her business how it works if you want to look her up she is online on most platforms as girls twiddling knobs that's knobs with a kicking cut or a k um so yeah knobs with a k if that didn't make sense and you can find all sorts of things they're doing definitely subscribe to their podcast they did an amazing episode recently which i will let you experience immerse yourself in because it would be a lovely surprise if you are going in completely blind without any any introduction from me and I just think that there's a lot everyone can learn from the ways in which Isabelle's approached her business I think that you can continue being a musician and making the music that you believe in that's sovereign to you without having to compromise it if you can then build projects like this on the not really on the side I guess to the fore and then the music kind of becomes secondary for some people and for other people it's the other way around and I think that we're going to see a lot more of like where people's complementary skills go and what they can offer the world on top of their songs.

58:43So that was quite a different episode I think maybe you disagree I'd love to hear your feedback you can email me on sean at drownandsound.org you could also pop a review on Apple Podcasts if you want to. There's not a lot there, which considering all the bad reviews I've given bands over the years, I thought I'd have had a few more nasty ones. And if you want to suggest ideas for future episodes, you can do that. If you want to ask some questions for some upcoming Q &As, I'm really thinking about how I can do stuff that's much more useful for artists as well as music fans. This podcast is predominantly for music fans to get their head around the chaos of all the people that make all the things that we love and I think that looking for the moral compass in amongst it all trying to find like the right path in the things that have got some things we can value and believe in I think is really important and I hope that in creating this podcast that's what I'm creating for you so I've been Sean you've been you this has been the Drenum Sound podcast I will see you next time bye

59:51Thank you.