You’re probably all a bit sick of hearing about this project by now. Am I? I don’t know, is the honest answer. I have days where I wish I could stop talking about it and move on to the next thing (though in fact I am already moving on to the next things…). Then I have days like yesterday when not one but TWO people decided to write really nice things about it, and I go back to the tracks and the mix CD and remember how proud I am of it all.

Anyway, although I still have several stories to share about the individual tracks (something I’ve been doing on Instagram, but should probably compile here at some point), I feel like it is time to put a bit of a marker down at the end of the year of ‘In The Pocket’.

If you haven’t been following, and are curious about the mental state of a label owner as they release a pet project into the world, you can read previous coverage here:
Launch announcement
Release week update
Post-release update
London release party report

And there’s also Stephen Howe’s brilliant Anatomy of a Track piece about his tune ‘Lockring’.

Let’s get the business out of the way first.

The money part

Last time I wrote, there were 30 CDs left, and now there are only 10. Well, the truth is I have 30 still in my house, but 20 of those are already allocated to artists on the compilation and buyers in the US, to whom it’s impossible to ship anything right now. I’ll be taking those copies over the Atlantic with me at the end of January and shipping them out from NYC. Once the final 10 CDs have been sold, I will have made a loss of about 150 EUR on the CD, mostly due to my shoddy accounting (as explained here). It was meant to break even, but I am nonetheless happy with this outcome, as it is made up for by my share of the digital sales.

Regarding those, total digital sales so far have been 540 EUR for the full compilation, and 360 EUR for the individual tracks, the latter amount distributed unevenly depending on how popular each tune has been. Some tracks have sold better than others, as far as I can tell as a function of how ‘big’ an artist is and, as a consequence, how much of a social media following they have. I don’t like the fact that this correlation is so strong, but that’s the nature of the system, and there’s no doubt that the hype from bigger artists will have attracted people to the project as a whole, which is obviously a good thing.

I had run this project on the basis of an even split with the artists, so, given there are 22 of them involved, I receive a 1 in 23 share of the full compilation takings (23 EUR) and 50% of the individual track takings (180 EUR) making for a personal payday of 200 EUR. This covers the money I lost on the CD plus some expenses I incurred for two of the three CD launch parties (as I wrote about here, the London launch party was funded by my friend Sam’s party Pumping Velvet).

As for the artists involved, based on the digital sales up to the end of the year, the amount I am able to pay out is:

Full comp: 23 EUR per artist
Tracks: average of 7.50 EUR per artist

This, as I’ve said before, is a pittance when you consider the amount of work that goes into making music. At least one of the artists involved told me they’d rather not be paid anything than 20 quid, or words to that effect, as a meagre payout just reveals how pathologically undervalued music making is. I see the point, but from my perspective it’s a point of principle to make sure the artists receive what they’re owed. (Another contributor told me they’ve never once received a payout for their music, despite releasing on successful labels!)

It has also made me reconsider the way I configure the split between the artists and me: is it really fair that I get a payout that’s almost 10x higher than they do? I did have to do a lot of work to make this whole project happen, but it never would have happened without the hours and hours these people have spent in the studio over the years. Obviously no one is making any actual money here, so perhaps it’s besides the point, but for future projects I am going to consider a suggestion I got from a friend: a 66% allocation for artists on digital releases.

Press

The two nice people that wrote about the project are Eoin Murray in DJ Mag’s ‘Top Compilations of 2025’ feature:

and Philip Sherburne in the regular mixes digest on his Futurism Restated substack:

Various people have asked me how these press things end up happening. Well it’s a mixture of organic connections and me sending the press release I wrote out to a few contacts, though not often with much response. DJ Mag only heard about the release because my wonderful friend Laura went to the pub with a friend of hers one evening in London and was bigging me up, and that friend’s boyfriend happened to work for DJ Mag and was also a fan. So I got an email contact and sent it over. Philip Sherburne, meanwhile, found out about the project when I wrote about these 8 Formative Mix CDs as a way of preparing the ground for announcing the CD. That newsletter, and the post I did about it on IG, got shared and reached way more people than I expected it to. It’s the kind of thing that is (I assume) the bread and butter of proper PR agencies, but for me it felt like a bit of a coup. Philip then very kindly bought the CD and, a couple of months later, wrote about it.

For me what’s most heartening about reading these things is the words that people reach for when trying to describe the music on the compilation. I may often doubt my promotional abilities and, if I am disappointed by a release’s reach or struggling to get bookings, I may also doubt whether anyone wants to listen to the music I play or put out. But one thing I never doubt is whether that music is itself any good. I know it’s good, but it can be difficult to classify. So to see the tracks described as wriggly, snappy, colourful, squirrely (my favourite) and bursting with colour and texture, and the comp/mix as a whole being described as a “delightfully amorphous suite” — well, that’s the whole point, and it’s very validating to hear it come from someone that isn’t me.

The aftermath

And I guess that’s what I’m left with at the end: the physical existence of the mix CD, and the lovely things people have said to me about it along the way. There is no doubt this project has reinforced the friendships I already had with many of these artists, and has helped others grow, especially through the launch parties. With the artists I knew less well going into this, it’s been a uniformly positive experience, but inevitably somewhat transactional. At times I’ve felt like a bit of a vulture, scavenging musicians’ work for my own nefarious DJ ends. Perhaps that’s a bit ridiculous, but I can’t help it — there’s a fundamental insecurity about not producing music myself, and capitalising (if not financially then in terms of visibility) off the work of those who do. But then I do remind myself that without me popping up in their inboxes in the first place, many of these tracks may never have been released in the first place. And this hasn’t been a rapid fire digital comp release job, either.

In fact, one thing that’s sort of slipped through the cracks of all my public bloodletting about this project is actually one of the parts that’s most important to me, at least creatively speaking. It’s come up a couple of times in the texts I’ve been sharing about the individual tracks, but mostly it’s remained a crucial yet largely invisible force. It’s the curating, sequencing and mixing of the project, in other words, the way in which the final mix CD inscribes, embodies and deepens the relationships out of which it was made. The process of gathering 21 tracks from artists as disparate and versatile as these over several months, all the while conscious of how those tracks might sit together in a 70-minute mix, not just musically but in terms of meaning (this artist helped mix that artist’s track, so they go together; this track is called ‘The Traverse’, so it should represent a transitional point in the mix; these two artists perform together, so should be side-by-side; that track was the final part of a live performance, so it should be the final track of the mix; etc), the painstaking process of testing and reconfiguring, with its many happy accidents and, more than once, its frustrations, and then the final process of recording — that’s something I’ve not really got into. Which is odd, because that’s one of my favourite topics: what I do as a DJ.

Maybe at some point in the future, with a bit of distance, it will be fun to dive into the detail of the “rough-hewn stitches” that went into those “intricate seams” (thanks for that one Eoin!). For now, aside from sharing the remaining tracks (not that small an undertaking: 10 down, 11 to go), I think in general it’s time to PUT DOWN THE MIX CD and focus on what’s next for the label. The next release is from a familiar face, but we’re entering unknown territory with a digital release and, hopefully, a remix. Yet there’s a physical twist…does anyone here like jigsaw puzzles?