Humanity in a Digital Age
[Music]
[Applause]
technology is a
great enabler
if you’ve got a smartphone and an idea
you can start a micro multinational
company
you can become a creator and reach a
global audience
or you can get us a really important
social message out there largely
unedited and unsensitive
yet the digital age is more than ever
a human age sounds strange coming from a
google guy
let me explain why i say that using a
story of wonderful personal connection
the story starts in mitchum in south
london
pretty poor part of town with this guy
quasi court quasi grew up
with good parents but they split early
on
and it was kind of messy he didn’t have
much access to
information much access to education
much access even to positive role models
but he had a big dream his dream was to
do music
he’s a fantastic lyricist he can sing
and he can rap but he didn’t know how
to do that to do music you need time
and you need money so like many in quasi
situation
he fell into a nefarious lifestyle
he turned to the streets
he felt it was the only way that he
could
buy himself the time and earn himself
the money
to realize his dream he knew it was
wrong he didn’t want to do it but he
didn’t feel
there was any other way he was a
conscientious
gangster
he’s also a very curious and well-read
guy he reads a book a week
very smart and he
lived this life of
two worlds
he’d have a shotgun on one side of his
bed
for self-protection and the latest book
he was reading on the other
every day he would put
his life at risk
and he’d then put that money into doing
what he loved
eventually that risk caught up with
quasi
his friend was shot in the head and
killed
his cousin who was just 15 at the time
was stabbed
he survived fortunately but he
got a hot head and he went around in a
revenge attack and killed
the person who had attacked him
and got prison time
in combination this was the wake-up call
quasi needed
he was determined to do music
but not like this this was not his
narrative
so quasi took the brave decision to
withdraw himself from the street life
to cut his ties and to take the long
and hard road doing some freelance work
here and there scraping together as much
money
as he could along the way to pay for
studio time
photography videography
we met through a mutual connection
a guy called joe binder
joe’s a privileged guy from north london
quasi a talented artist from a poor
suburb of south london
and they connected because they had
something in common
they were both youtubers joe started a
youtube channel when he was at cambridge
university
vlogging about what it was like to be at
this
impressive university
quasi used youtube to get his music out
and they met in soho where quasi was
filming joe recognized he was probably
making youtube content and they struck
up
a conversation joe knew
technology could help quasi
so he connected us actually over
quasi and i had a first meeting and
struck up a mentoring relationship
he was helping me understand what life
was like
growing up in less privileged
circumstances
in a poor neighborhood in south london
i was helping him as much as i could
think through things like
how to think of a budget how to make a
budget
how to construct a marketing plan how to
build an audience
through social media
and we hatch this plan to
raise some money quasi wanted to do an
album he’s got this wonderful mixture of
grime which is a type of wrap and rock
and he puts them together
he calls it grok and he wanted to do an
album of his work and his unique sound
so we hatched a plan initially to help
him raise money through a crowdfunding
platform called kickstarter
the problem with kickstarter is
you can campaign for weeks and weeks and
weeks
and even if you get 90 95 percent of
your budget target
you won’t get anything you have to hit
or exceed your
target i also felt that the budget that
quasi had set out with was
unrealistically low
i came home after a long meeting with
quasi
about this project and i asked myself
what can i do to make a difference
i invest in small companies i’m an angel
investor
i don’t know much about music or at
least i didn’t at the time
but i know a lot about digital and
technology and that’s largely where
music lives these days
so i thought why didn’t i think about
this as a business
so i literally googled how to start a
record label
and i found a company called ditto
based in liverpool that did record label
in a box
i’ll have one of them
so big community records was born
it’s a business on a social mission
to surface and celebrate fantastic
creative brilliance from lower
socioeconomic communities
ditto helped me set the company up they
gave me a stack of standard
music contracts they helped register
me with all of the royalties and rights
management companies around the world
and i signed quasi
as our founding artist and we set out
to realize his dream
that dream came true in july
2020 with the release of quasi’s debut
grok album
blood on the english carpet
a wonderful album with eight
beautiful tracks along with five videos
all released over youtube it’s had sixty
thousand
streams so far
and over six hundred thousand views of
the videos
but these days it’s not enough to put
your art out there and reach people
you have to be noticed
so that’s what we’re working on at the
moment and
you know we’ll continue to do that until
we reach a point
where this is a sustainable income
for quasi he can do what he loves and he
can earn decent money from it and it’s
not just about quasi we’ve built a whole
team
around him
all of whom have two things in common
first they’re brilliantly creative
and second they’re also from lower
socioeconomic communities
and they need their start
we have subi su malanga
he grew up in zimbabwe
he taught himself to code he saved up
he bought himself a computer
he then taught himself how to do special
effects
his dream is to be a filmmaker
so sabisu has done all of our music
videos
jada bruni a wonderful graphic artist
from croydon in south london
jada’s done the logo for bcr
as well as all of the album art
we’ve got ben nyonga ben was a sales guy
at john lewis
a department store here in london lost
his job
during covert his dream is to be
a marketeer he’s studying marketing in
pr
so ben came over and he leads pr
and zina bamra see and i worked together
at
at google and
z just loves music she’s always wanted
to be involved and she’s been doing
our artist liaison work
so technology is a great enabler
joe and quasi wouldn’t have met had they
not had that youtube
connection quasi and i connected
over whatsapp i figured out how to start
a record label
with a simple google search
we’ve released all of the music
over digital streaming platforms 200 of
them
around the world and that’s how people
listen to
quasi’s art all of the videos
are on youtube and now we’re building an
audience using social media
but the golden thread and the real
secret source
that links this story is the wonderful
human connection
and the unexpected collisions along the
way
so next time you’re sitting on that
train or that bus
take the chance to strike up a
conversation with the person next to you
reach out to somebody who you would
otherwise
not perhaps meet or or mix with
you never know where it will take you
and that’s why the digital age
is more than ever a human age