Rewind: The Benefit Of Hindsight

Nick Harris

DJ, producer, founder of NRK Music and label manager for Cadenza Records

It’s an old cliché – no regrets and all that – so it’s difficult to look back and define what you would do differently because the industry has changed so much over the years that, even with hindsight, things may not have panned out the way that perhaps they would have anyway. But saying all that, of course there would have been a few fundamental decisions made in my formative years that I’d have liked to have made, but didn’t.

Certainly music production is something I would like to have jumped on way before I  found the time and space to do so because I think nowadays it’s a much harder slog to achieve any degree of success, both artistically and financially.

Having had a record label for 15 years, it was perhaps a late move to get into production in those latter years, when all around me there are record labels that have been purely defined by the ‘key artist’ themselves, and NRK Music did not really have one ‘key’ artist that you could associate with the label throughout its tenure.

Of course, the label’s chosen path was many artists, through the years, through the trends, but knowing what I know now, a production career from the off would have opened up many more doors for me personally (live, DJing, touring etc.) and also may have helped put the label further on the map more, to give it more of a personal appeal, and perhaps to this day, to keep going.

A production career from the off would have opened up many more doors for me personally.

Who knows… so I now find myself perhaps a more ‘elder statesman’ on the electronic scene, but fully embracing the technologies out there to create and write music, something that’s been with me since a teenager (as part of various punk bands), but I guess I am experiencing a much harsher world in which to find acceptability with my music, for better or worse….