There’s a moment most music producers never talk about.
You’re finally making a song you feel good about, you’ve cleverly shaped the chord progression, made a texture that came from random experimental resampling, and a groove that’s making you move in your chair.
And then quietly, a voice gets louder in your head.
What will labels think of this?
Is this too weird for the scene?
Would this fit on that playlist?
Will listeners feel the same as I do about this song?
And just like that, the session begins to change.
You don’t stop making music, you just course correct. Slightly.
You pull the weird chord back toward something safer. You tighten the groove into something more familiar.
You make a hundred small decisions, each one reasonable on its own, that collectively sand down everything that made the idea interesting in the first place.
This is the invisible cage every artist begins to build for themselves at some point.
At first glance, it feels like this pressure comes from the structure of the music industry itself:
Genre tags
Subgenres
Scene politics
Playlist gatekeepers
Label aesthetics
I don’t believe these are good or bad, they simply are.
But these are real forces that influence budding artists and pretending they don’t exist is naive.
However in today’s letter I want to discuss the dark side of this story.
Which is the fact that most up and coming artists internalize these forces long before they ever interact with them directly.
In other words, long before an artist has the chance to explore and understand their own sound, they begin prioritizing validation, whether that’s from a scene, a label, or an imagined audience.
When your decisions are filtered through what others might think, the music slowly shifts.
It stops sounding like expression, and starts sounding like positioning, and the most detrimental part?
This is where perfectionism begins to take hold.
Because when you’re creating for an external standard, nothing ever feels finished, only “not good enough yet.”
Not right enough for you, or right enough for the imaginary listeners you’ve let in to your own creative process.
I’ll be the first to admit that in today’s world you can’t avoid or completely deny the influence of these pressures, especially if you want to build a fanbase or music catalog that can financially support you.
But what if we could transmute this pressure into something positive?
That’s what I want to explore with you today.
So if you’ve ever felt these external pressures influence your work, decision making or even mental health… consider today’s letter a practical breakdown of how I’ve dealt with these pressures and reframed them into positive exercises that actually help me develop my sound further.
I want to tell you about a specific moment, because I think you’ll recognize it.
Years ago I was deep in a session. The kind of session where time disappears and the music starts to feel like it’s writing itself.
Somewhere during this session I caught myself, asking:
What will labels want from this?
I didn’t ask:
What does this song want to become?
What am I trying to say here?
Does this feel good?
Do I like this?
Instead it was, what will labels want?
I sat there with that question for some minutes, because in reality I had no idea.
Because the truth is labels want different things, different labels want different things and sometimes even the same label wants different things at different seasons of their release schedule.
The question was unanswerable and I had been letting it run my sessions anyway.
The cost was my truest creative expression.
But funny enough the shift didn’t come from rejecting the industry, it came from recognizing that the question itself was the enemy.
Not the labels.
Not the scene.
Not the industry
The internal act of outsourcing creative authority was.
The act of letting an external judgment and validation come from a specific group of artists become the primary filter for creative decisions. That was the real problem.
Musical authenticity isn’t a luxury for artists who’ve already “made it”, at least from my perspective it seems like it’s the foundation.
It’s what makes the music worth making in the first place, and paradoxically it’s what makes it worth listening to. The music that moves people is almost always the music that moved the person who made it first.
What I’m trying to show you is that the sequence matters:
1) Create for yourself first.
2) Then seek a home for your music out in the world.
Not the other way around.
Here’s the insight that changed everything for me, and I want to offer it carefully because it’s easy to misread.
What feels like industry pressure is often something else entirely…
It’s Resistance using the industry as its justification.
Steven Pressfield calls this force Resistance in The War of Art. If you haven’t read it, the core idea is this:
Resistance is the force that opposes creative work. It’s not external, it’s internal. It’s the part of you that would rather not make the thing, because making the thing means risking something.
That be exposure, failure, irrelevance, ridicule or a deeper fear.
Pressfield goes on about Resistance as being an intelligent force. It doesn’t say “don’t make music“, that would be too obvious, instead it says:
Make music, but make sure it’s good enough
Make sure it’s safe enough.
Make sure it fits.
Make sure it belongs.
It weaponizes your own ambition against you and it uses your desire to succeed as the mechanism of your creative paralysis.
Can you relate?
And here’s what makes Resistance so effective against up and coming artists:
For many of us it wears the mask of the music industry. It borrows the costume of real, legitimate forces such as label preferences, genre conventions, scene etiquette, etc.
And uses them to make its demands feel rational, reasonable and even professional.
But there’s a distinction that changes everything, and it’s the difference between what I call Unconscious and Authentic Constraints.
Unconscious Constraints: The kind imposed by fear, by the imaginary audience, by Resistance. It narrows your options without your consent.
Authentic Constraints: The kind you choose deliberately, from curiosity rather than anxiety. It focuses creative energy and creates the conditions for unexpected discoveries.
For example, the constraint itself can be identical...
“This song must be 115 BPM” means something completely different when it’s a rule you’re afraid to break versus a parameter you’ve chosen to explore.
Now let’s explore some practical exercises that will help us reconnect with our own authentic sound in a world filled with external and social pressures.
Each of the following exercises is designed to interrupt the approval loop and rebuild your relationship to creative constraint from the inside out.
Let’s begin.
This is a dedicated session where the only rule is that the music must be bad, messy, or completely out of the ordinary.
Not “experimental.”
Not “avant-garde.”
Not “a creative exercise.”
Bad. Messy. Wrong.
The intention is simple:
You’re making music that you will not share, not export, not finish, and not judge.
The session exists for no one.
Not for a label, not for a playlist, not for your followers, not even for your future self who might listen back and find something useful.
Why it works:
The imagined listeners in your head only have power when there’s something at stake. When the session is for no one, the stakes disappear.
And when the stakes disappear, something interesting happens:
The unfiltered version of your creativity shows up.
This is the part of you that made music before anyone was listening. Before you knew what genres were, before you had followers, before you understood what “professional” sounded like.
It’s still there, it’s been waiting.
How to do it:
1) Set a timer 30 or 60 minutes (or a time of your choice)
2) Open a new project and make something. Anything, the worse the better.
3) When the timer ends, close the project.
Don’t export, share or listen back that day.
4) Notice how you feel after.
The feelings, lightness, the surprise, the occasional flash of something genuinely interesting. All of that is data.
The interesting part is that you’ll occasionally stumble into the seed of a real idea in these sessions.
In other words, it’s a great way to trick yourself into creating memorable ideas.
For this exercise you’re going to set constraint or a restrictive creative rule.
Here are some examples:
Must be 128 BPM
Must use only vintage synths
Must fit in a 4-bar loop
Must have no kick drum
Use your chosen constraint as a starting point, but explore it from personal curiosity, not utility.
The constraint is the same one that might normally feel like a cage. The difference is that you’re choosing it, consciously, as a parameter to investigate and build upon.
Why it works:
Constraints help steer our focus.
A blank canvas is paralyzing, a canvas with a rule is a concrete starting point.
But the rule only becomes useful when your relationship to it is one of curiosity rather than compliance or obligation.
When you choose the constraint, you’re asking:
What do I actually think about this rule?
What happens when I take it seriously?
What happens when I push against it from the inside?
You might discover you love 115 BPM when it’s your choice. Or you might discover you hate it and that clarity is equally valuable.
Either way, you’ve learned something about your actual sonic preferences, which is the raw material for your signature sound.
How to do it:
1) Choose a constraint that feels restrictive, ideally one from a genre or context that has felt like external pressure.
2) Spend a session exploring it with genuine curiosity.
Not “how do I make this work for the listener?” but “what is actually interesting about this constraint?”
In this challenge it’s all about using an external structure as a starting point for internal exploration.
This is about mapping your actual influences, it’s what I call your Sonic Genealogy.
Why it works:
Most artists, when they’re honest, have wildly eclectic real influences.
When you make music from your actual Sonic Genealogy, it’s harder to copy. It’s more emotionally resonant and has a uniqueness that genre based music almost never achieves, because it’s drawing from a combination of sources that is genuinely yours.
How to do it:
1) List 10 songs that made you feel something before you cared about genre and go back as far as you need to.
2) Look at the list and notice the patterns. Not genre patterns, but emotional patterns, instrumental, sonic, stylistic, etc.
What do these songs have in common in terms of how they make you feel?
3) Now look at your recent work. How much of that sonic or emotional DNA is present?
4) Close the gap between what moves you and what you make.
If you’d like to go through the full Sonic Genealogy exercise you can read the full how-to article here:
The need to belong isn’t a flaw, it’s human.
It’s one of the most human things there is, we’re social creatures. We want to be seen, recognized, welcomed into something larger than ourselves and the desire to belong to a scene, a genre, a community of artists is not weakness.
But there’s a big difference between belonging to a community and outsourcing your creative authority to it.
The industry will always have gatekeepers.
The scene will always have rules.
Algorithms will always have preferences.
These are not going away, and pretending otherwise is a form of Resistance that doesn’t serve you.
The creative who makes music for themselves first doesn’t reject the industry, they arrive at it with something the industry cannot manufacture:
A point of view the industry can’t manufacture only recognize.
— Hermes
P.S. If this idea of creating from within instead of reacting to external pressure resonates with you, this is exactly what I’ve been building with Song Ritual.
It’s not another tool to make better sounding music. It’s a system designed to help you protect your creative process from the very forces we talked about today.
Structured sessions.
Intentional constraints.
A space where the work comes first, not the approval.
If you want early access, you can join the waitlist here.
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