Here’s What the Music Industry Taught Me About Marketing & Go-to-Market Strategy

Any accountants wanna freestyle??

Nearly ten years ago, at the age of 16, I made a decision that would alter my life trajectory in ways I never could’ve imagined.

At the time, I had just started sixth form college (high school for the Americans reading). I was studying Philosophy, Sociology, and English Language.

To be quite clear — like most 16-year-olds — I had no clue how these subjects would play a role in my later life. In fact, I had no clue what I was going to do with my life.

But through God’s grace, I was introduced to the world of selling beats online.

My step-dad had some old, unused music equipment that I started toying with in the summer of ’16 after finishing my GCSEs. For fun, I’d make beats, and subsequently realised I could monetise them on a platform called Beatstars. Alas, DSBBeats (my old pseudonym) was born.

Fast forward two years to age 18: I’d amassed 70,000 followers, moved out of my mum’s into a flat in London, and was interviewing giants like Grant Cardone. But eventually, I pivoted from music to building a “real” B2B business.

After many struggles, I founded a Go-to-Market agency that I rapidly scaled to £250k revenue in its first year. I had found success again. But I also found a recurring problem with my clients — a problem I had seen years prior in the recording studio.

Many of the clients we worked with, no matter how great the outreach or how perfect the email copy, simply did not perform as well as others. In the lead generation space, we usually blame the data or the algorithm. But looking back at my roots, I realised the issue was much deeper.

The “SoundCloud Rapper” Fallacy

No industry on earth prioritises Marketing over Product more aggressively than the music industry. And that is exactly why the failure rate is so high.

During my time as a producer, I worked with countless artists who truly believed that “Marketing” (whatever that ambiguous expression meant to them) was the key to unlocking their stardom.

They would spend hours spamming Instagram DMs with “Check out my mixtape!” links. They would pay for fake views. They would obsess over their album artwork or their hashtag strategy. They did everything except the one thing that mattered: making a song that people actually wanted to listen to.

They were trying to scale noise.

When I transitioned into the corporate world, I saw the same behaviour. I saw Accountancy Firms and SaaS founders acting exactly like Soundcloud rappers. They were trying every cold email hack, every LinkedIn automation tool, and every “growth hack” — without ever asking if their product was something the market actually loved.

The Mix vs. The Music Video

In music, you can sometimes mask a mediocre song with a high-budget music video. The visuals might get you the click, but if the song is trash, the listener isn’t adding it to their playlist. They aren’t sharing it with a friend. The “churn” is immediate.

Business is no different. You can have the slickest landing page (the music video) and the best outbound campaign (the radio promo), but if your service delivery is generic or your product is buggy (the song), you are burning cash.

Take the average Accountancy Firm. It is a commoditised service. If they market themselves as “We do tax returns,” they are the equivalent of a rapper saying, “I rhyme words.” It’s the bare minimum. It’s boring.

However, if that firm niches down — serving only vegan restaurants, for example — and charges a premium to solve problems specific to that industry, they have suddenly remixed the song. They have changed the Product Positioning.

The Lesson

When did we get to such a disgusting point in the world economy where we are happy to aggressively promote products that the users themselves aren’t happy to refer to their friends?

In the music industry, the best marketing strategy is a “hit record.” If the song is undeniable, it travels.

In business, the best Go-to-Market strategy is an undeniable product.

As a marketing man myself, it pains me to say this, but it is the truth: Your product should be so good that theoretically, you shouldn’t have to spend a dime on marketing to grow.

Stop trying to fix a bad song with a louder speaker. Fix the music first.