Most of the time, I arrive late

Most of the time, I arrive late. Not because I wasn't invited earlier — but because that's simply not how it tends to work. By the time an ensemble calls me for a chat, they have usually been going for five or six years. They have recordings, reviews, a growing reputation, a small but loyal audience. They have also, almost certainly, a website that was built by a friend in 2021, a bio that hasn't been updated properly, and a nagging sense that something in their communication isn't quite hitting the spot — that the outside world's idea of who they are doesn't fully match the inside world's reality.

They know something needs to change. That's why they called. And then, not infrequently, something else happens.

We have the conversation, agree on what the work should be, the scope makes sense, and there is genuine enthusiasm for getting this done properly. And then a tour comes up, or a recording project that needs financing, or a venue deposit that can't wait. And the brand work — which has no hard deadline and no contractual obligation attached to it ... gets pushed.

I've heard every version and I do understand the logic. The tour and invoices are real, and brand strategy feels, at that particular moment, like something that can wait. In an industry, where financial margins are thin and artistic opportunities have to be seized when they appear, deferring the less urgent thing makes sense.

But it's also short-sighted.

Here's what tends to happen in practice. The tour goes ahead, and it's good; the recording comes out and gets solid reviews; the ensemble is genuinely building something. But the communication isn't quite working — everything that recently happened has been thrown at the website, which doesn't capture what the ensemble actually is and does, the positioning is still approximate, the story that should be travelling ahead of them into every room is still being improvised on the spot, and has a hard time keeping up. And now the ensemble wants to grow: to reach new audiences, to interest different programmers, to make a compelling case to funders for the next phase. They're attempting all of that without the foundation that would make any of it significantly easier.

The brand work didn't disappear when it got deferred. It just became more complicated, because now there is more material to negotiate around and to make sense of — habits, assumptions, associations that have built up over years — and working through that thoughtfully takes considerably more time. Beyond the direct cost, there's the slower accumulation of missed opportunities: every funding application written without a sharp positioning behind it, every promoter introduction made without a narrative that sticks, every potential audience member who landed on the website and couldn't quite grasp what made this ensemble different from the three others they'd looked at that week. These aren't dramatic failures, but they are small, invisible frictions that compound over time without ever announcing themselves as the consequence of a decision made earlier.

I think of it as a threshold investment — the kind that feels disproportionate relative to what came before, but which is the actual price of the next level.Not because what they had before was wrong, but because it was built for a smaller version of what they're becoming, and it's now holding them back rather than supporting them. Fort an ensemble, the resistance to that investment is understandable — it's more than they're used to spending on this — but the ensembles I've seen make it thoughtfully tend to look back on it as the moment things shifted.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a complaint about musicians prioritising their music. I admire the depth of commitment to their artistic work and the willingness to sacrifice a great deal for it. But I think there's a false opposition embedded in the way this choice usually gets framed. Brand strategy gets classified alongside other back-office costs — something administrative, something that supports the real work from a safe distance rather than being part of it. And from that framing, it's entirely predictable that it loses out to a recording every time.

Let me reframe this; the artistic identity or brand — how you're understood, who finds you, what story travels ahead of you — is not separate from the artistic work. It is that artistic work, extended into the world. Getting it right isn't so much a marketing exercise but a creative one. And like most creative work, it is significantly harder to do well under pressure, retrospectively, when you're trying to fix something that calcified without anyone quite noticing, rather than building something dynamic and with intention from the start.

The question I find myself wanting to ask, when a client tells me the brand work will have to wait until after the recording, is simply: what is the recording for? Not cynically — it's a genuine question, and if the answer is purely artistic, that's a complete and respectable answer. But if part of the answer involves audience growth, profile, career development — then the communication infrastructure that would actually deliver those things isn't a separate item from the recording. It's the other half of the same investment. A recording without a coherent story around it travels less far than it should. A tour without a clear identity behind it fills rooms more slowly than it could. The artistic investment and the communication work aren't competing for the same pot of money so much as they're designed to amplify each other — and treating one as optional tends to quietly undermine the other.

And it's work that deserves proper attention, not something to be squeezed in between rehearsals by an already overstretched artistic director who has approximately seventeen more urgent things to deal with.

That's the conversation I keep trying to get to earlier.