Michael Walker: Yeah. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Darren Hemmings. So, Darren, let me give a quick intro. Darren founded Motive Unknown in 2011, scaled it to a 30-strong team serving 60-plus top-tier music clients. He has worked with elite independent labels, global pop acts, and leading music production brands.

He's also the author of Network Notes, which is a go-to industry newsletter that shapes music business insights. And so I'm really excited to have him on the podcast today to talk a little bit about where we're at right now. And as I'm recording this, there are some big revolutions and movements happening in tech, and how those things intersect with arts and culture.

It could be really interesting—sort of like two different chords starting to come together. And my keyboard's probably gonna sound really—oh gosh—the velocity is like real bad right now. I need to fix it. But I'm imagining like...

Done. Good. Just notes. This sounds great. Dissonant notes—like when they come together, there's kind of conflicting, clashing, dissonant notes, but if you like...

Oh man, it's real bad. I need the bla on that.

But anyways, Darren, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you for taking the time, and yeah, looking forward to our conversation.

Darren Hemmings: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to get into it. It's gonna be a good chat.

Michael: Absolutely. So, maybe for anyone that this is their first time connecting with you, could you share just a little bit about who you are and how you found yourself founding this company and working with the types of artists that are in the roster?

Darren: Ooh, that's a lot of years to stuff into a short space of time. So I've been in the music business since the late '90s. I actually started doing IT support for Sony Music back in the day when they were still in their golden era—right?—of like System of a Down, and, you know, Cypress Hill and J-Lo and the South Park album. And, you know, they were kings of the hill for a while there.

But I was actually at Sony through like 1999–2000 as well, when it kind of went from the highest of highs to sort of off a cliff in the face of Napster and stuff. So, you know, I was around then.

And then I took a bit of time out—running a label, doing radio, doing other things—and then joined a company called PIAS in about 2009 as the Head of Digital Marketing there. And led a bunch of campaigns for three years there. Then I left in 2011 to found Motive Unknown.

You know, it was just a one-man outfit, basically.

Michael: Well, it was like a stupid pun. I was just like, "Unknown."

Darren: Yeah. I mean, people still go, "What is the..." and you're like, "Oh, really? It's been 14 years. Come on." But you know, so I started that, and the first band I worked with on that was a group called Alt-J.

And they went platinum in the UK and won the Mercury Prize. And I suppose that kind of gilded things for the—

Michael: Lovely.

Darren: Yeah. So did all that. Grew, grew, grew. And you know, we've been across scores of things ever since. But now, as you said in your excellent intro, there's now about 30 of us. We have about 65 clients as an agency, about 35 indie labels, probably 10 or 15 artist clients.

And then we also work with brands in the sort of music production space. So we have clients like UJAM and, you know—oh, dear—Sound Labs. Sorry, I had a brain fart there as to the name. But yeah, Sound Labs, that do the AI voice cloning and stuff like that.

So we're kind of at both ends. We work with the people selling to people making music, and then at the other end we're working with the people that have been signed and are trying to release the music and get somewhere with it.

So yeah, but it keeps growing. It's doing very well, and I think really we're just there to help these people connect with audiences in a meaningful way that gives them a kind of lasting relationship with their fans.

I've always approached this with a steadfast view that I think marketing is made vulgar by bad marketers. You know, it's like advertising is vulgar because you are so used to being smashed over the head with it in every conceivable way. But it doesn't mean that it's inherently bad—it usually means that the people doing it are bad.

And it's the same with marketing. I think if you get it right, the fans love it. If it's being done well, the fans are grateful for it because they're being made aware of things that they love, and also they're not being made aware of things that they don't love. There's an art to this.

So I'm kind of proud that what we've built is something that really helps those labels and artists connect with those fans and build longer-term relationships that work in every direction.

'Cause let's be honest—when you are an artist, you are trying to sell. That's the awkward truth. You're trying to sell people on your music, you're trying to get their attention. And it can be quite difficult, 'cause you sort of have to force yourself on people a little bit. They're not just gonna find you of their own volition, so you've gotta put yourself in front of them.

And I think in doing that, there's an art to doing this in a manner that is authentic and meaningful. I mean, I think all these words have been a bit overused, right? Everyone tosses them around now like they don't mean anything almost.

But I think it ultimately, to me, just keeps boiling down to emotion and connection. A fan should be emotionally resonating—the music should resonate with them. It doesn't matter if it's deep and meaningful music; it could just be music to get wasted and have a party to. It's not the point. It's whatever sort of connects with you.

And it's then taking that emotion to connect with the artist more and nurture that relationship. I think in and of itself, it's not complicated. I think we've all just made it very complicated, and we've allowed a lot of things to get in the way to complicate things further.

How's that for a run-through?

Michael: That was great, man. That was like, profound. I like it.

So what I'm hearing you say is that, really, at its core, what you've learned and what you've built is really about helping artists to connect with the fans and build a community. And yeah, there's a lot of fancy and advanced tactic things to try to do that, but it's probably a lot simpler than we make it out to be.

Often it's just about people coming together and providing value. I really like what you said about marketing and sales too. As a function, it does seem like there's sort of a... those words are tainted a little bit. Tainted is kind of a strong word, but often there's sort of this feeling—especially with artists—like, we don't wanna "sell out" or somehow feel like it's wrong or manipulative to market.

We're trying to convince someone to do something that they don't wanna do. But what you're saying is, actually when it's done right, this is about you actually just providing value and about you figuring out who are the people that genuinely would resonate and get value from what you offer—and just by letting them know that you have this thing that's going to benefit them.

Darren: Yeah, totally. I think one of the ones I always loved was, I took my family to see Metallica when they were playing in London one year, and Metallica just had it down so cleverly. I mean, they're Metallica, right?

They—you can't—it's a bit like when people used to reference Radiohead giving away one of their albums. It was like, yeah, but they're Radiohead. They're not you. So it's not a like-for-like. But Metallica, I think, have really sort of—at points I think they get it wrong and they go a bit far—but I just remember going to this concert.

They had their own beer for sale, but they were selling them in cups that were these plastic cups that said "And Beer for All" in the ...And Justice for All font. Of course, everyone's then just—it's like the cheapest merch ever, 'cause I think you could get the cup for like two pounds, you know, whatever.

But the thing I remember most was, like, my son at the time was about—I think they had roadies going around giving the kids these Metallica rums with the kind of "M" on the one side and then the date of the concert on the other. So they're unique. But they weren't giving them to the adults—they were giving them to the kids.

Now, I'm sure someone somewhere will look at that and go, "That's sneaky," or, "That's nefarious." But my son—it made his day. He had something we didn’t get. It meant a lot to him.

I don't know, I just think sometimes with these things, it's—I think with a lot of marketing as well—I mean, I work with Run the Jewels, and it's something we talk about a lot with Run the Jewels. It's like the give versus the take.

And Run the Jewels earned a lot of goodwill by giving their albums away and going, "Alright, if you want the record, have the record. Here it is on the download. Just give us your email, you can have the whole thing." And they've done that with every album they've released. And it earns so much goodwill.

People view them very much as—they're happy to spend money on tickets and vinyl and stuff like that because it started with a give. And then they earned the right to take, in the sense of saying, "Alright, well we've got the record for sale on vinyl."

When we did that on the last record, we raised over a million dollars in less than 24 hours—all of which went to BLM charities because it came out in the wake of the George Floyd murder and all that kind of thing. But it was a sign of just the people power involved and the goodwill and the love that people have when you give a bit first.

And I think that counts for a lot.

Michael: Mm, wow. That's super powerful. Yeah. So, focusing on providing value first and giving is—both—even if you're wanting to be selfish and get more, it's kind of ironic that the best way to do that is actually by giving more and providing more value, building reciprocity.

Yeah. And ultimately that doesn't make you have less, but when you give, you actually have more. Isn't that an interesting paradox?

Darren: Well, it is. But I think in this world, the more I run a company, the more I realize that much of success lies in normally slightly bucking against what feels like the logical path.

It is the easy path, right? It's like with this, you can just stand there banging on going, "My record is out now. Everyone should listen." But the reality is everyone else is going, "Alright, man, but you are one of like 3,000 artists who bothered me in this way in the last two weeks. Why should I care about you?"

So, taking that time to build connection, I think, is totally worth it. Finding ways to do that—I mean, someone on my team—well, he's just moved on to a different role now—but he was releasing music and he was putting stuff out on cassette and just doing it in limited runs because it made it more collectible.

And in his scene, that created more connection. So, you could argue that it's an arcane format and there's all these things, but his audience loved that. And he made that available and it worked for them. So there are all these ways that you can build these connections.

I don't think it has to be grotesque. It can just be—as long as it's honest and real and in line with your vision—I think that's where it works. Because it's something I see quite a lot, where people want artists to just all do the same thing. It's like, "Oh, you should be posting on TikTok. You should be on Instagram. You should be blah blah blah."

But every artist is different. I was talking to a label the other day and they were saying, okay, almost every artist with a label now just refuses to use social media because they're done. They're just over it. They won't do it. So we've now gotta find different ways of—

It doesn't mean that they're not on social media, because obviously there are many an artist I could probably think of that don't post regularly on social media, but if you search social media, there's lots of other people posting about them. So they're all over social media, just not of their own creation—not their own injection of their stuff into it.

So yeah, there are ways and means of still going about doing these kinds of things, but it's listening first to go, "Where do you want to be and what's authentic to you?" And then amplify that. Don't just chase the ambulance because everybody else is doing that. That's not the way to do it.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Darren: Ah, that's so good.

Michael: Yeah. The thought that came up as it related to that, like giving versus taking—because just from a physics standpoint, if you have two people and one person has something and gives it to someone else, then normally you'd think you're losing something. You're giving away something, and so it's actually not a good thing.

But as you're saying, it's actually the opposite. Like, with business, it's maybe more like a tree that's blossoming and creating fruits. It's almost like you're giving—it's like you're producing fruits and the fruits are dropping—but actually when you do that, you're not losing something, because those can multiply and they can blossom and they can propagate.

Darren: Yeah. I mean, it's perceived value, I think. Because I've been in this long enough—I remember when Topspin was the hot thing and everyone was giving away a track for email.

But of course, when everybody's doing it, it's not special anymore. It's that Syndrome—or whatever his name is—in The Incredibles. He sort of has that line: "Once everybody's super, nobody is."

And it's that. If you're all just following the same thing and doing the same thing that everybody else does, then yeah, that's not gonna fly.

So, finding that value—I think Run the Jewels nailed it with the album. Everyone else is giving away tracks, and when they first started, they were like, "No, we're just gonna give the whole record."

Which, at the time—for years after that—if anyone mentioned that in a label meeting, like, "Well, maybe we just give the record away," you could feel the air chill. Everyone was—they'd just look at you like you'd taken leave of your senses.

But then all of a sudden, going, "Okay, but we've got half a million people on a mailing list over here from giving things away." So, tell me again that it doesn't work—because it does. It's just gotta be done right.

Michael: Mm. That's so powerful. There's another point that you made earlier that I thought was worth reiterating, which is, you put it as—when Radiohead gives away a song, it's a little bit different than an average run-of-the-mill artist giving away a song.

And I felt like that just kind of harkens—to use the word harkens, right? I think that's like one of the first times I've ever used harkens, but it's a great word. I think it harkens to the power of just going deep on your product and making it so good that it almost markets itself.

Like, in order to market something, you want to make sure that the thing you have is actually really valuable and it's going to change people's lives. And you do kind of need that equation in order for letting people know about the thing to work as well.

So I really like what you're talking about as it relates to artists being authentic and focusing on their craft and actually creating something amazing as well, which is not necessarily a separate thing from marketing. When it's done well, it's actually maybe the most important form of marketing.

Darren: Yeah. I mean, I always remember the band SAULT—S-A-U-L-T—from over here in the UK. When they put their—I think it was their third or fourth release, but it was called Untitled (Black Is). I think it was either that or Untitled (Rise)—I forget which order they came out in. But they put those up on Bandcamp in a pretty low-key style.

And I mean, the word of mouth on that when it came out was just like nothing I've seen in years. But it was that thing of the right music at the right time. They were essentially protest albums about Black identity shortly after the George Floyd stuff, a bit like RTJ4.

And yeah, I mean, it really caught fire because it resonated with people. It created an intense emotional response and connection with it. To my knowledge, I don't think they spent a penny on paid marketing or doing anything—they just put it up and it went.

Sometimes it's a bit of an awkward truth. You get records that just land in such a manner that you're away, and they have a momentum of their own. And it's almost like for people like me, you're kind of running behind this snowballing thing just trying to keep up. It's pretty crazy to try and do that.

But yeah, it speaks to the fact that the art, first and foremost, is what is the marketing. It creates something so massive that people want to invest in that.

I don't think people focus on this small fact enough, but I do put a lot of stock in the idea that—I know it's a bit of a cliché—but those early fans are a bit like early-stage investors. I think there is still that kudos of being able to say, "I turned you onto this band," and, "I was into them before you or anyone else." Because it gilds my cool, if you like, to be like, "Yeah, I heard this group before you did."

I saw that really firsthand with Alt-J. I remember them playing the Africa Centre here in London in Covent Garden to maybe 200 people, and within a year they were playing the O2 to, I don't know, 15,000 people.

And a big part of that was just word of mouth. The 200 people that were at the Africa Centre—you feel like every one of them told 10 people, and it spreads like a virus. It just goes.

These days, when people are marketing, it's almost like they forget these simple social dynamics. If you can just convince other people to be your evangelists, then it makes your life a lot easier.

Even encourage them to be your evangelists—give them reasons to spread words. Help them. Reward them. Do whatever. But never underestimate that value of, "I'm going to go off and tell 10 of my friends," because if everyone does that, you've just 10x-ed your audience and you're away.

So yeah, that's how you approach it.

Michael: Even then, there's almost like an exponential effect, depending on how many of their friends they shared it with—who also share it with like 10 other friends.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. At that time, for the band to sell 300,000 albums in the UK, there were only nine acts that year that did that. So, pretty rare. And it just came out of nowhere.

People have become a little too distracted by the platforms and the things that are there to help, but they’re sort of viewing them as the be-all and end-all.

Whenever I'm doing presentations or stuff like that—I did one a little while ago at Music Ally's Connect conference, and you can find it on YouTube—in that I was saying, I don’t think marketing as a concept has changed in like a hundred years.

I think most marketing books are kind of rewrites, really, of How to Win Friends and Influence People. They’re all updating them and shooting them through the new filter of now—social media. But prior to that, it would've been websites and the internet more generally. Prior to that, possibly, how to get press and attention, whatever.

But the underlying mechanics of marketing, I think, have remained the same. I feel like at the moment, people are losing their way. They're getting too dragged into the platforms and the minutiae, and I think they're just losing sight of what marketing really is.

Like I said, when you boil it down, it’s about emotion and connection—when it’s art. Whether it’s visual art, or films, or music—it’s the same. It’s how people connect with that. So it’s nurturing that.

Don’t get too obsessed on the, "Does that mean you have to be on Instagram?" Not really. You can be. But there are a lot of other ways to do that as well.

So I think it’s getting back to basics, in a strange way—understanding this stuff and then responding accordingly.

Michael: That's powerful. I love this conversation because I agree—it seems like it's easy to have sort of shiny object syndrome and wanting to know what’s the next hack or the next tactic.

But those things change so quickly. And if you focus on the fundamentals—the principles that don’t really change—then regardless of what the tactic is, you know you’re doing the right things. You can catch the next wave.

Darren: Yeah. I always say it as kind of like, don’t be ambulance chasing. By which I mean, don’t just be running after whatever the latest trend is.

You can do that your whole life and you won’t get anywhere. You have to start with a core faith and a belief in what your art is and its ability to impact people in a way that they respond.

If you start with that, then I think you’ve got to then look at where your audiences are to connect with them.

But I don’t—I think too often people just assume it’s like, "I must build an audience on social media."

And I mean, it’s something I’ve been talking about a lot of late.

Name any music scene of the last 50 years. Pick one. Go.

Michael: Alternative rock.

Darren: Okay. So, if we reduce that to grunge, that’s pretty—

Michael: —general.

Darren: Yeah. Let's, well, let's call it grunge for now. But grunge grew out of an area, right? It was broadly grown out of Seattle. There were a lot of bands that weren't—Afghan Whigs were from Cincinnati and Smashing Pumpkins were from Chicago—but Seattle was ground zero for that.

Dubstep—ground zero was London and South London. Eighties hair metal—LA. But everywhere started with scenes, and those scenes had a physical presence.

And I think it's something that people have missed a lot lately. I think we need to get back to scenes. I've done a couple of workshops recently with artists who’ve been mentored and things like that.

And the interesting thing is that there's this sort of view that they should be on social media and they've got to be working their social media game. And they're now all getting a bit worried because social media's becoming quite algorithmic, quite transient. It's not as simple as building a following and just posting to them. It's all gotten a bit mixed and muddy.

I found it interesting because it's almost like artists assume that they're always working alone. And I think if you look back at music history, the biggest things in music didn't really happen because artists were operating alone. They happened because they recognized like minds in their physical region and came together.

And that coming together creates those scenes that become a magnet for press attention and for A&R men—or people, A&R people, sorry—all that stuff.

I feel like we got so obsessed with big tech making things easier for us through the last 15–20 years that now everyone's forgotten that maybe you don't need it, and you can build scenes yourself.

And I think that's—I really would love to see artists focusing on that more because I think there's so much power in that. Every music thing that has impacted me in my entire life, I can tell you what city it started in. It wasn’t some nebulous discovery on the internet. They all brewed out of specific areas.

And I think we could probably do with going back to that now. I think it's overdue.

Michael: Hmm. So interesting. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is that very rarely, if ever, does an artist have a breakout success without it being a part of a movement or part of a scene.

Often, as you're coming together with complementary artists and fans and this live scene, that's when these big movements really happen.

It reminds me of this wave analogy—where it's almost like if you imagine in the ocean there are these waves, these big waves. And if you're this little ripple and you're trying to go against a bigger wave, you're not really going to be able to catch a lot of momentum.

But sometimes there are these bigger waves that can come along, and you can swim along, you can support—like everyone together kind of—you know, there's this big wave that happens.

Darren: It's funny you say that because that was always my analogy with marketing. With any band, mine was the other way around. It wasn’t waves coming in—it was me throwing stones out.

Essentially, you can throw a lot of small pebbles into a pond, right? And every one will just land and make a mini ripple. Or you can get a really, really big boulder and you throw that in—it makes a massive splash.

My point was: if you're doing marketing, try and think enough to line things up so that instead of just random, isolated acts of marketing, you've got a plan—a cumulative thing going on here—so that people are like, “Oh, okay. I've seen them here. Now I’ve heard them on the radio.”

In the old days—he says, referring to like 2012—we had a monolithic culture, so it was kind of a lot easier. If you wanted to break a band, you needed press, you needed radio, you needed TV, you needed outdoor, you needed some online. If you could nail all of those, and the record was good, you were going to be good.

You'd reach those audiences. It’s this thing called the marketing Rule of Seven.

The idea is, very few people just see or hear you and go, “Oh, I’m in.” It’s a thing where they have to sit there repeatedly and get exposed to it—whether it's a song, or whether it's like they hear this song and think, “Oh, that's good,” but then they're distracted because life’s busy.

But then if they hear it again, they'll be like, “Oh, there’s that song again.” Then if they read an interview with that band, they’ll be like, “Oh, okay, yeah, these are the guys I was looking at.”

So, yeah, it's a similar analogy of a sort—all involving water and all that. But yeah, I like it.

Michael: Man, now you’re just—now we’re getting my analogy brain going.

What you just shared makes me think of a fire, a fire pit. And it sounds like what you're saying is that rather than scattering all these kind of unrelated pieces of content together in these different fire pits, which may not get a whole lot of traction in and of themselves, you kind of pull them—if you stack them together in the right way—

If you have breadcrumbs that kind of lead you back to that fire, then that's a way that someone might—

It might not light on the first try. They might—this person has a piece of wood in this analogy—but they might not light on the first take.

But if they go to a show and there’s this big fire of everyone else, it's like they leave now—yeah, they've been lit as well.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah. That's really it. And I think people need to think more in those terms. We have this a lot with our clients where we're kind of going, we've seen it in the past where people would be like, "Okay, what's the plan for the first single?" And we're like, that's not the question. The question is, where do you want to be in three years? And then what's the plan within that, you know?

So obviously we're going to market the single, but then what? And like I said, it's that thing of you don't just do isolated things. You are saying, "Right, this is going somewhere. We're building this." And we're trying to elevate here. I think people tend not to think in those terms. People can approach it in quite an arbitrary manner. And I think actually they need to think a bit longer term and a bit more like: what's the consequence of what I'm doing?

Because people often just think, "Oh, I'll do an announcement to my followers and everyone will flock and consume in their masses." And it's like, that works when you are five albums in or you're Taylor Swift. But everyone else has to do some heavy lifting and keep selling people on their new single or whatever.

And so I think asking yourself all the time: What am I expecting the outcome of this to be? I'm going to do this, and then what are the fans and the people I'm addressing going to do? And then what do I do to respond to that? Keep nurturing this.

And to build on your analogy, Michael, you don't just light a fire. You have to stack the wood the right way, and then you've got to sit there fanning it a bit. You don’t just flick a match in and stroll off—unless you doused it in petrol. So it takes some work to build. You've got to understand that. It does need that view of: Where am I going to be in weeks, months, years’ time?

And consider it in those terms. I know this sounds super obvious—I'm sure people are listening going, “Duh”—but you'd be amazed. In my experience, people really don't think in those terms. And I think with this, you need to. Because if you want to be around in three years, you've got to have a plan to be building constantly and speaking to that.

Michael: It makes a lot of sense. Yep. Have you ever seen—there's like a science experiment, or sometimes I think there are a few different folks who do videos of this—where they show the dominoes stacked up next to each other. And you might have a little tiny domino, and then one that's twice its size, another one that's twice its size, another one that's—and so it makes this...

It starts as a little tiny domino, but then if you stack it up right, you have this giant, human-sized domino. And the experiment is that if you align all of those dominoes, then you push over that little tiny one. And as long as they're stacked up correctly, then that little tiny one can knock over that giant one at the end.

Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like what you're saying is that rather than you setting up all these little tiny dominoes and running around frantically trying to push over these little dominoes, if you align those dominoes with these bigger picture ideas, then you can get some serious leverage by having that stacked up together.

Darren: No, absolutely. And I think within that, it is... I feel for the modern musician in the sense that most artists—I could put ten bucks on the table now and say, if I went to most artists and said, “What would you do tomorrow if social media vanished?” Let's just say everyone shuts down Instagram and TikTok and all that, they'd all just be like, “Oh, I'd love that,” because then I can just go back to what I actually do and what I do this for, which is to write and perform music and connect with audiences.

But now I think people feel like they have to be the marketing department themselves, and they've got to come up with all these ways to be trying to connect and all this stuff. And I think a bit more planning and thought around that—saying, "Right, what am I doing? Where am I connecting? How am I doing this?"—to bring that authenticity, I think is really key.

It's important for artists to be able to be themselves and find time and room for their art to grow and evolve. Because otherwise you spend so much time running the social media and all the other BS that kind of orbits around you, that the thing that's holding it all up—which is the music—kind of falls by the wayside.

So yeah, it requires a degree of consideration, all of this. But I don't think it needs to be overbearing or onerous. I think it's a quality, not a quantity. And if you want to stand out amid whatever it is—100,000 tracks landing on DSPs every day—you've got to find ways to swim against the tide.

What I always quite liked—there's a marketing sort of guru, this guy called Dave Trott, who I think used to run Ogilvy in New York or something like that. He held one of those kind of really high-powered positions. He writes a lot of books about creativity and marketing and things like that.

And I always remember him—he gave this thing about how sometimes it's smarter to swim upstream, where it's quieter. And you'll find your audiences there. Or fishing upstream—you catch the salmon further up rather than at the mouth when everyone's got them on the way in.

And I vividly remember this being the logic we applied when we worked with Moby. Moby had done his second album of ambient music. And at the time—which was probably going back six or seven years now—there was a lot of furor around the fact that Spotify was filling ambient playlists with production music and stuff that they'd just bought in.

It was pretty clear they didn't seem to have high value for that type of music. So rather than try and get Spotify’s attention with that, we were looking at where else ambient music can be connecting with audiences.

At the time, there was—it's still around, I think—but the app was called Calm. And it was a wellness app with meditations and guided wellness therapy—audio stuff. And they had a bunch of production music on that that was all pretty bad, if I'm honest. It was just off-the-shelf piano tinkling. It wasn’t great at all.

So we went to Calm and said, “Look, we've got this record from Moby. What if we gave it to you exclusively for a month? What would that look like?” And they bit our hands off. I think at the time, they had 55 million active users. They put this record—like, you couldn’t get away from it on the app.

You open the app: “Moby’s exclusive—Ambient 2.” All this sort of thing. They did press, they did an email out to—I think they had like 50 million people on their email—because they’ve got everyone's emails. The level of exposure it brought was phenomenal.

For a release that was a difficult sell in the sense that it's not just commercial pop music—it’s chill music that you'd fall asleep to. And I think that's what Moby created it for—for that purpose of relaxing and everything else.

But in that context of where it found that audience, it massively resonated. I always cite it as an example of: we could have just been trying to grind away on getting Spotify and Apple Music to feature this—probably with very little success—or you look around and go, okay, this isn't the only place to take a record like this.

So let's find the other places and go there. Because there's millions of people using this stuff. I think it's using that now to—

It was that Dave Trott theory of “go where it's quieter.” Don’t fight to be heard among the whole rabble. Find the other spaces to be. It’s easier to get attention because you're not competing with 100,000 other bits of content to be heard.

So I always think in those terms now when we're marketing. It's not “where is everyone,” but almost “where isn’t everyone?” Where is it easier to resonate because you're not fighting with millions of other bits of content to be heard.

Michael: Mm-hmm. That's so interesting.

Darren: It makes a lot of sense.

Michael: And as you probably know this by now, I'm like an analogy guy. I love... I think all of us are—it just makes it easy to understand things. But that idea of the pool and everyone's fishing in the exact same pool... if you can go upstream and find a place that has more space, then that’s a big opportunity.

Also, like shouting—there’s a loud party and everyone’s just trying to speak up over each other. It’s like, well... yeah, either you have to get louder, and even then it’s just noisy, or you go somewhere that there’s not a bunch of loud noises. And then you can speak clearly. It makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, I would say the last question—and this has the potential to turn into a rabbit hole, so we can maybe just share... you can keep it light, although I would love to hear your... I’m sure you have some great perspective on this—is just like, at the time of recording this, there’s such a huge revolution happening with AI and technology, as it represents our capabilities as artists.

And there’s also a lot of controversy around these tools, how they’re being trained. There’s fear around, is this going to replace us? Or what does this mean for us as artists? So I would love to hear just your general perspective of this as a new movement.

I know there’s been tons of revolutions with different technology and tools, and in some ways, this is very similar. I’m curious if you also think there’s something unique about this wave. I know with AGI or superintelligence, it represents a different kind of technological revolution. Curious to hear your thoughts on all of it.

Darren: I mean, I think at the moment I'm just viewing AI... I feel like whenever there’s a raging debate about AI going on, I just want to take the word “AI” out and replace it with “computers.”

Because we can sort of sit here and go, “Computers are bad.” Malware and whatever—child pornography and weird stuff—there are just illegal things all over, and computers facilitate that. Ergo, computers are bad. Okay. But computers have also made massive advances in medicine, they’ve brought people together in ways they never could. They allow things like this to happen rather than me having to fly to the US to talk to you.

There are a million reasons these things are great, and I think AI is just the same. I think there's such a desire to polarize everybody all the time into extremities that the common sense gets lost in the middle.

I make music myself, and I’ve been really excited by some of the developments in AI. The one I always cite to people is there’s a synth called Synplant, and they released an update that allows you to feed it a sample of anything, and it will basically replicate that—resynthesize it into a playable synth patch.

But it means for people like me, if you heard this phenomenal bass tone on a track or whatever, you can just grab a snippet of that, feed it into this thing, and it will then deliver it—fully playable. So it’s like a guy's come in and turned all the knobs and dials to get the sound exactly that you wanted. But then from there, you can turn them some more and go, “Well, I don’t want it to exactly sound like that. I want to just... like it, but not quite like it,” and you can do all of that.

I think that’s an example of where AI is great. It’s super smart. Where I lose track on it—lose interest—is things like Suno and Udio, where they’re just turning out whole tracks. I always liken those to... they’d be great for when you buy the greetings cards and you open it and it plays a song—sing your happy birthday or something.

I think they could be quite funny for that, if you just want to have a comedy song play to your friend. That’s kind of about the level I view it on. But I think beyond that, it’s a bit ludicrous to assume that because something can generate an AI Beatles track or whoever, that we no longer need the Beatles—or insert any artist’s name you like in there.

Because to connect with artists is so much deeper than that. It’s not just their music. It’s their look. It’s the experience of hearing them live. It’s their interviews, it’s their opinions...

Michael: That cultural movement you were talking about earlier—it’s that wave.

Darren: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And AI can’t do that. It’s just never going to be able to do that. So I think it’s just like when synths arrived. I’m sure there were people that felt like synths didn’t belong in music, and they were ugly and grotesque and all this other stuff. And over the years, it’s not replaced anything. It’s created a new angle for music to be explored that’s delivered so much of where we are now.

But it hasn’t meant that there’s not room for someone to stand there with a guitar and reduce someone to tears with a song of pure beauty. It’s all possible and all there if we want it.

So yeah, I think that... Look, I don’t want to oversimplify the AI argument. There is a lot to resolve there. And I’m not impressed with... I think the British government at the minute is kind of looking to almost overrule copyright and allow AI companies to train on the work of British artists.

I just don’t understand—partly, I have to say, because it feels like that’s to the benefit of companies that are not British. So it strikes me as sort of odd that the British government would sell this stuff out for U.S. companies, Chinese companies, whoever, to train on their works when we don’t seem to materially gain from it.

It’s not even like they’re going, “Well, it would allow British AI companies to do this so that we’re doing something there.” So that sort of stuff, I think, is indefensible and pretty stupid. I think it’s quite myopic and rude, to say the least, to the people that create art.

But at the same time, I think this sort of... I had somebody block me the other day on Bluesky because I posted an AI-generated image of a UK actor called Brian Blessed—he’s this dude with a huge beard, best known for being in the Flash Gordon film. He’s got this big booming voice.

And I got AI to create him, but as an ‘80s rapper. So he was there with a Kangol hat and a big gold mic. And someone blocked me because they just said, “Well, anyone posting AI-generated images is an instant block.”

And I’m like... okay, man. I’m not going to fight with you about this, but it seems pretty knee-jerk. I’m not an AI slop account posting crap day in, day out. It was one time, and it just seems really...

Michael: This podcast is often boycotted because we’re using this thing called the internet... and people don’t like it. So...

Darren: Yeah. It's crazy. So I think generally it's an area that we... we are right to have concerns about, as we are with any new technology and what its capabilities may be. But I think sort of like everywhere in the... every corner of society at the moment seems to have been badly polarized into just like, I'm right, you are wrong. And it's all very extreme.

And I don't like that. I think we've got to have room for a sensible dialogue about this stuff and to just approach this with some intelligent thought and say, what works for... where is this good and where is it not good? I mean, AI looks like in health it's making phenomenal leaps forward in things like breast cancer detection rates. There's all this stuff where it is genuinely doing amazing work.

So to just write it off as like, it's evil and bad and wrong—it's like, okay, but we can and should be smarter and more nuanced in our approach to this stuff. We're humans. We're better than that. Let's see it in those terms, right?

Michael: Hmm. Yeah. That's so good. I feel like... I don't—you should write a book or something. You already have... there's like some great...

Darren: It usually just gets dumped into Network Notes, to be honest. They're just random thoughts of this and that. But I mean, yeah man, if you stack those dominoes together...

Michael: Yeah.

Darren: I mean, look, with all this stuff, I just think... particularly in music at the moment, it feels like we don't make enough room for just, I guess, intelligent conversation about these things. It's too polarized and too silly, and I think that's quite sad.

Michael: I totally agree. I mean, I think creating space and having the ability to listen and empathize and truly try to understand, especially opposing points of view... often there's truth to both sides, but you don't get to this emergent property from the tension if you're not willing to actually hear out the other side.

Couldn't agree more. And yeah, man, so as we approach the end of our podcast, I want to say again thank you for taking the space to be here and share...

Darren: My pleasure.

Michael: ...some of your experience and wisdom over the music industry over decades. And for anyone that is listening or watching this right now who’s interested in connecting more or understanding better—whether they’re a music company or they're an artist—it sounds like you have a holistic suite that you can use to help people.

So I’m curious if you could share a little bit more about, for someone that’s listening to this right now, what’s the best place for them to go to learn more, connect more, and be a part of what you’re building?

Darren: I mean, I think if you go to our website at motiveunknown.com, that does a pretty good job of explaining the different ways we help artists and record labels and things like that. It sort of walks through our vision for how we help people.

So I think that’s a good way of understanding the kind of... how we are viewing the world and how we tend to approach things from there.

And I think on a more day-to-day basis, if you go to networknotes.motiveunknown.com, you can sign up for my newsletter—that’s free. And that's just about once a week, I just send out really just some thoughts on all manner of topics.

The last one was about AI, but I’ve written about the need for local scenes. I'm also a big defender of the independent music space, so I'm critical of what’s going on at the moment with Universal buying up so many indie companies and things like that.

So it covers a broad range of topics, but I think particularly in the last six months, I've really tried to make it quite an optimist's newsletter as well, because I think it’s a little too easy for us to lapse into, “Everything is bad. AI is going to take all of our jobs and it’s all doomed.”

And I choose not to take that view. I want to look at how we can make things better and where are the glimmers of hope—and all that stuff. And they are out there, and I think it’s not as bad as people often spell it out to be.

So yeah, sign up for Network Notes is probably my other thing, because I just think it's... something that just gives food for thought as much as anything else.

So yeah. But we’re always happy to chat to people. So if anyone’s looking at what we do and getting a sense of who we work with and all those kinds of things and would like to talk more, then by all means get in touch. And you can just email hello@motiveunknown.com and that will come to me and my two directors, Matt and Tom. So we’re always happy to have conversations.

Michael: Awesome. I’m definitely gonna go subscribe. So it's Network Notes...

Darren: Yep. So yeah, just go to networknotes.motiveunknown.com. It's on Substack too, so if you just search "Network Notes" on Substack, you’ll find it.

Michael: Cool. And like always, for anyone that’s listening to this, we’ll put the links in the show notes for easy access.

Darren: That’d be great.

Michael: Thank you. But Darren, man, great conversation. It's rare that I get to geek out this much on both fundamental analogies and metaphors—which I think is really helpful to understand—and also I just appreciate the mindset that you approach this with in terms of curiosity and having open conversations and trying to get to ground truth without it being about trying to create polarized views or extreme fear on either side.

So yeah, really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you again for being on the podcast today.

Darren: My pleasure. Been great to chat. Thank you.

Michael: Yeah. Hmm.