In 2023, I had never produced a single track

Today my music comes out on the label that discovered Daft Punk.

For seven years I led IT transformation projects at Avanade and Crédit Agricole CIB. Music was something I listened to, never something I made. In 2023 I needed a different balance, so I started taking it seriously.

I taught myself everything online, through hundreds of hours of tutorials: composition first, then mixing, then audio engineering. What made me progress fast was the method I had learned at work: break it down, deliver, fix, start again.

<h2>Three years later</h2>
<p>33 independent labels have released my music, 45 times in all. Each release is a label choosing to put its name next to mine. One of them is Soma Records, the Scottish label that put out Daft Punk’s first single. I also started two labels of my own.</p>
<p>I have played Tresor, Berlin’s historic techno club and a stage many DJs work towards for years, and shows in three other countries. My tracks have been backed by Ben Klock, Nastia and Luke Slater, some of the most respected names in techno. Every month, around 26,500 people listen to my music, roughly the population of a small town.</p>

<h2>Teaching</h2>
<p>Teaching became the other half of the work. I have spent hundreds of hours coaching producers one to one, many of them already releasing and playing, some of them working at Ableton, the company that makes the software I teach: a bit like teaching Excel to people from Microsoft. I created two masterclasses for Home of Sound, one of the leading schools for electronic music production, for students worldwide. In three years I went from listener to someone other artists come to for advice in my corner of techno.</p>

<h2>Running it alone</h2>
<p>To run all of this on my own, I built what a small team would normally handle: the website, hosting, payments and automations. AI became a daily working tool, in the service of a project manager’s method.</p>
<p>In my next piece, I’ll explain how AI made it possible to run all of this alone, and what that taught me about how teams adopt, or reject, a new technology.</p>