Arielle (Industry Hackerz Founder)

I will try to cut an extremely long story short.

Although my music making began when I was 8. 

I got serious and started Industry Hacking when I was 13 years old. 

I impressed my local council with what I had achieved in my bedroom studio and how serious I was about getting somewhere in the industry with my self-pressed mixtapes with insert graphics made on MS Word and printed on my mother's printer.

They believed in the vision, and gave me £1000 to buy studio equipment.

I still remember the first things I bought! 

  • Some RAM (yup, when 512MB DDR Ram was a respectable thing you added to your PC!)
  • Yamaha mixer
  • Samson CO1 (it was all the bedroom studio rage back then),
  • and a pair of active monitors.

I bought some foam soundproof squares off of my friend and glued and nailed them to my bedroom wall!

With no formal music education or qualifications I self-taught software like Cubase, Reason, Fruity Loops (now FL Studio) and Cool Edit Pro which eventually became Adobe Audition, making my own beats and learning how to mix and master my vocals to give it that professional studio quality.

I spent a lot of time at different music studios learning how different engineers would manipulate raw sound and then I’d go back and try and replicate some of their techniques and fuse them with my own.

I was also fortunate to have an older brother and cousins deeply embedded in the underground music scene; they did it all before me, the pirate radio, the studio time, the live performances.

So, when it was my turn, I knew exactly what to expect! And I had these vetted mentors to guide me.  My brother taught me about cadence and breath work, delivery – so when I started applying this, in comparison to a lot of my peers who never had these sort of hacks, I was coming with a different sort of confidence and flavour, actually something that’s powered the way I do pretty much everything I do.

Music gave me that confidence to deliver information the way I do.

On my 19th birthday, the BBC invited me to perform at Glastonbury; I haven’t had a birthday top that since.

Shortly after that I went on a Europe tour with a company called Roots En Routes; what an insane experience that was – traveling around Europe, doing what I love!

Needless to say, I met some insanely talented people and made some quality collaborations. But when I got back, I had an empty pit in my stomach, I suddenly didn’t want to do music anymore – it came from nowhere, but I think the trajectory I was on, I didn’t know what to do next, I wanted to keep excelling at that speed and had no idea how to – I feel like at that point I had hit a peak and had no direction.

The passion started dwindling, I wasn’t attending shows and studio sessions, I became very unreliable. I always said I would enter the industry again at some point in the further, from another angle. 

I wanted to develop talent, open music studios across the world, host events, and teach young musicians how to navigate the various stages of their careers while retaining ownership and building a lasting brand.

Not to get taken advantage of as is notorious of the industry – what’s always rang in my ears was an ancient bar (lyric) from my older brother, Daniel-

“the music business is hideous, to the idiots, when I say idiots I mean those in it, with their eyes zipped – I was a wise kid even I was surprised by the height that these industry snakes rise, it’s frightening- quicker than lightening you could be left high or dry without knowing who by or why but with the proper guidance you could survive the hype, now I’m a tell a little story of mine.”

Daniel “Vega” Francis

And then he went on to explain a scenario of how somebody who claimed to be helping them, took advantage.

So, yeah,

I really wanted to be a part of what changes that… again, long story short – that’s where I’m coming from and that’s how and why Industry Hackerz was born. 

What I Used To Get Up To…

PS. I don't tend to share this stuff, particularly as it is so long ago (this particular track is 12 years old!)

But this will forever be one of my personal favourites as the beat was made by Jordan James after we sat for HOURS and watched hours of “deep” conspiracy theory content on YouTube! The studio was a whole vibe that day 😅