A Small Introduction To Me

Hello, my name is Jake Aspey. I at the time of writing this am 25. I live in the beautiful city of London, UK and I am one of those people you often get told are a good for nothing snowflake millennial who just want to be artsy and not have a real job. And to a certain point thats true.
A Beginning That Starts In The Middle…..
Back in September 2014 I was finishing off my degree in Music Technology (Specialist) at London College of Music with my FINAL MAJOR PROJECT! It was a documentary web-series (that never got finished) and album of musicians of YouTube. It was called We’re Not Just Cats and it was even successfully crowd funded via Kickstarter and everything (kinda cool right). We (me and my friend Sumner at the time) filmed something like 5 episodes 4 were released along with some other side interviews I had shot and and 2 music videos. It was ok but the music industries views at the time on musicians from YouTube were swinging so radically I could not keep up and the project sadly came to an end just 1 year later never being completed.
During this time one of the artists from the project I worked with (Libby Tidley) approached me to produce her debut EP which was really exciting for me. I had just essentially finished my degree in this shit and been studying music tech for the last 5 years. As the EP was coming to an end I asked Libby how she was planning on releasing it (as it was my 1st production project outside of university I wasn’t being paid for my time but from the profit of sales) to which her reply was “umm I dunno. How do you release music?”.
I told her about 3 different methods that I had learned about releasing music and seen been practiced quite successfully (for the time). Her reply “well why don’t you just do it for me and like start a record label or something!”.
I slept on the idea and decided why the fuck not. I mean at least this way I can garuntee that I will get paid for this work in some way, and Libby had already agreed for me to do her next EP too. So it looked to me as kinda of a no brainer. If I do this and it goes well I could keep rolling with it and just keep releasing Libby’s music and if not well it gets swallowed up in to the great hole of music on the internet and we both just move on with our lives.
THIS WAS THE START OF THE REST OF MY LIFE!
Now its 3 years later, I have worked with 5 artists, released 9 records, a couple of remixes and a couple of singles. We have hit iTunes charts around the world and have grown a audience not just for the musicians (they always come 1st) but also for the label as a thing. It’s kinda wild I am not gonna lie. Did I see my self when I decided back in 2008 that I was gonna work in the music industry as a producer/engineer after googling it for 30 minuets in a computer lab based french lesson (my secondary school had some odd ideas of what counted as learning) that 10 years later I would have 1st been able to be the part of that many releases (just for my own label that is I have worked on a few things out side of the label too) but 2nd started a record label with some kind of following!?
So over the years I have been doing this I have learned a hell of a lot. Talked to some amazing people, and even given a few talks about the industry and my label it self. But I have a lot more to talk about. I think the best way to learn about an industry that essentially throws so much shit against an wall in hopes that it sticks is to read and listen to as many people talk about their opinions on how it works for them as possible. Learn from them and their mistakes and then eventually we all grow (that probably very naive of me to think that way but I am an optimist at heart no matter how cynical I am in person).
So this is where I am going to write these thought and opinions on the music industrY. Be that business, tech, musicians, releases etc. Just remember when reading it that it is that, an opinion*. No one in this industry has it perfectly down to a formula. There are people that think that they have but they are wrong. They are just extremely lucky. Yes even you Jimmy Lovine. Even You.
*all opinions in all articles are strictly my own and do not reflect any of the views or opinions of my record label or any artist associated with the record label.
