I’m getting excited about music again (and I’m going to do something about it)

It's time to shoehorn something else into this business!

Music has played a huge role in my life, thanks mainly to my dad, who has been a musician most of his life. We’ve got family photos of me sitting down at his keyboard collection as a kid, mercilessly hammering the keys. I’m pretty sure that’s where my love for music began.

I spent every weekend as a teenager and throughout my early twenties working with his band on the technical side and as a stand-in DJ for wedding gigs. I even joined him on stage later on as the keyboard player during his long-running success as an Elton John tribute act.

I’ve also spent an ungodly amount of time making music that very few people have ever heard.

I think about music all of the time, I miss making it, and I miss playing it.

This is why I’m shoehorning it into this business. You know, like the car stuff.

In a recent newsletter, I mentioned that we’re working on diversifying the business. I don’t want to rely solely on tech as an outlet for my work or as a way to pay the bills; putting all of my eggs into that basket - no matter how profitable it can be - doesn’t excite me enough. Adding in two other content ‘tracks’, as I’m referring to them, feels like a far more sensible way to build a resilient, exciting business.

One of those tracks is automotive, which we’ve been working on for a while now, but the other is music. It’s something I’ve tested already, by working music production-based content into the Mark Ellis Reviews channel. The response was positive - people wanted more. The challenge was finding a space for that stuff among the avalanche of tech products that hit the market these days.

The answer to this is simple and exciting - create a spin-off content strategy that tackles the music niche. Find a way of building a narrative around my love of curating, making, and playing music. Target an audience which loves that stuff as much as I do. Publish content which enables me to be creative and attract the attention of brands.

When you start a business, it isn’t long before it becomes all-encompassing. You spend every waking moment either working on it or thinking about it. As such, your available time for non-work activities gets squeezed. Family time becomes a priority, because it always should be - and it’s not long before the same applies to rest (when you eventually accept that sleep is rather important). The consequence of this is that hobbies often get neglected, and that’s exactly what has happened to me with music.

On holiday recently I rediscovered the bug for actually listening to music. Inspired by DJs I’d been following on TikTok, I decided to set up a music discovery strategy that would enable me to find music I loved and curate it for my other love: DJing. This is something else for which I’ve rediscovered a passion, having wilfully agreed to soundtrack my sister’s 40th birthday party in June.

Getting back into music production is much harder. It requires a lot of time, space, and focus - three things which are tricky to find at the moment. They’re not lost forever, though, and I know that if we can figure out a way to release my time within the business so that I can focus almost solely on content creation, I can make it work. Equally, we’re in the process of slowly reworking the studio space, and that’s an ideal excuse to make room for a music-related area.

I haven’t lost interest in tech. Far from it, I think we’re in the middle of a fascinating era for the devices we rely on every day. I’ve just never been the sort of creator who can make the same videos about the same stuff again and again. I’ve also been around long enough to know that you have to diversify your business if you want to grow it significantly and be in a position where you can only work on the stuff that excites you.

As always, I’ll be using this newsletter to chart the journey of these three content tracks, and I can’t wait to share it with you.