Rewind: Laura Jones
When the dream starts to change

I have been thinking a lot about change.

Not the shiny, neat version, or the kind that looks good in a bio or a launch announcement.

The other kind. The slower, more confusing kind. The kind that starts as a feeling you keep trying to ignore, until eventually you can’t.

What happens when the thing you worked so hard to build no longer feels the same?

I keep coming back to the image of a rubber band. The tension of keeping it stretched and held in place, pulled in opposite directions, until eventually it snaps forward into the unknown.

There is the pull towards what you love, what you have built, what you still want to believe in. And then there is the pull away from what no longer fits, even if you are not ready to admit it yet.

I think I’ve spent most of my music career inside that duality.

I have been a music obsessive for as long as I can remember. As a teenager, I built whole parts of my identity around the bands and songs I loved, and I don’t think that part of me has ever really gone away. Even now, there is still nothing quite like discovering a new artist or hearing a song that hits so directly it feels like it was written just for me.

As I graduated from university, an artist that I was “managing” — read: helping with his Myspace and getting him the occasional local gig — somehow got signed to my favourite record label, and that was it. We were off. We moved to London, the gates to the music industry club had opened, and I could not believe I got to step inside.

And it was as magical as I had hoped. Working on music that I loved, with great people. The tours and festivals, the guest lists, the awards, the dinners and drinks. The excitement of release day, and the feeling of music you had some small hand in finally going out into the world to be cherished by others, to become part of culture. That was everything I had dreamed of.

I went on to build my career, and then my company, through taste, instinct, consistency and care. Through relationships that grew slowly and organically. Through finding music I loved and people I believed in, and trying to help them move towards the lives and careers they wanted.

I was never really business-first, for better or worse.

I understood indie rock. That was my thing.

People told me it was niche and that I would never make any money working in such a small corner of the industry. That I should think about pop, or dance, or something more commercial. I did dabble here and there, mostly unsuccessfully, before realising that the only thing that ever really worked for me was trusting what I genuinely loved.

I was never the loudest person in the room. I was never the big personality working the conference floor, making sure everyone knew I had arrived. I have always been more comfortable in the background. More likely to be found at the side of the room than in the middle of it.

But by working in this way, and focusing on the kind of music I adored, was also where some of the tension began.

I often felt like the industry rewarded the opposite of me. People who were more outgoing, more forceful, more visibly ambitious. Better at networking. Better at playing the game. Better at performing confidence.

I started to realise that in music we are not only our job titles, but we are also performers. Whether manager, A&R, publisher, PR or lawyer, there is another role being played. You become your own hype person, constantly exuding the idea that everything is great. The tour is selling, the data is good, the reviews are fantastic. No weakness here.

And it can feel lonely when there is no space to admit that something is hard, or that you don’t know everything. That you are tired and stretched and wondering where it is all going, and whether it is sustainable.

The doubt creeps in. The band tightens.

Once you are inside those music industry gates, you are supposed to feel lucky. You know how many people are standing at the door wanting to get in. You know how hard you worked to build a name, a roster, a reputation, a place in the room.

So when you start to question whether you want to stay, there is shame in that. It can feel ungrateful, wasteful, even embarrassing. Or worse, like maybe you just couldn’t hack it.

That fear kept me going for a long time. The sense that leaving would mean throwing something away. That if I was no longer “Laura from Little Underground,” then who was I? Would people still reply to my emails? Would I still matter if I no longer had a deal to bring, a client to introduce, an opportunity to offer?

These are not especially comfortable things to admit, but I think they are probably more common than we let on.

For a long time, I was so busy thinking about everyone else’s career that I didn’t really stop to think about my own. I lost sight of the fact that my career was also something I was allowed to tend to. My life was also something I was allowed to build with intention.

The weight of responsibility, the self-doubt and the questions around sustainability had the elastic completely loaded.

Then something happened with a longstanding client, over a project that should have felt like a huge win, and instead became a moment where I realised that the trust I had built so much of my work around was no longer there in the way I needed it to be.

The band snapped. I lurched forward.

It wasn’t the only reason I left, but it was the moment I stopped being able to pretend I could carry on as before.

Somewhere in that period, another question had started to form. What would it feel like to have a space where these things could be spoken about honestly? Not just the strategy and the practical decisions, but the self-doubt, the uncertainty, the need to step back and ask what you actually want to build.

I had coaching, went to retreats, and slowly made more space to be honest with myself.

For a while, I didn’t know exactly what came next. I just knew I couldn’t keep rebuilding the same thing in the same way.

There was grief in that, and embarrassment, and a lot of wondering whether I had somehow let myself down. But there was also relief. The kind that comes when you finally stop trying to hold something in place that has already started to move.

And slowly, with a bit more distance, I began to realise that I didn’t want to leave music completely. I still cared deeply about the people in it. I just wanted to find a different way to be useful.

That is how Side B started to take shape.

Not as a neat reinvention story. More as a response to a need I understood because I had lived it.

And maybe that is why I wanted to begin Rewind here. Because change rarely feels like a clean before and after when you are inside it. It can feel like failing before it feels like freedom.

I hope that, in sharing my story and the stories that follow, someone might feel a little more understood. A little less alone. And maybe a little more able to admit when something in their own life is asking to change.