Chapter & Verse Hustles Harder

It is no secret that building a career as a DJ and producer requires a lot of hustle. One of the reasons so few aspiring artists don't reach their goals is that they aren't willing to put in the work. They start. They become impatient, and they quit. One artist who always put in the work from the beginning of his career until today is the UK's Chapter & Verse, real name Barry Pearson.

For a long time, Pearson was mainly a consumer of the culture, hitting parties around his native England and in hotspots like Ibiza. It was only after seeing Michael Bibi and Cloonee in quick succession in addition to attending an elrow event, he knew he could be the one on stage dealing out the music.

At this point in his journey, Pearson was already much older than most artists when they decided to pursue music, but that didn't stop him.

"I think it is a lot more difficult when you are older to try and break through the barriers and the gatekeepers," he explains in his Gray Area Spotlight. "From the very beginning, I always knew what I wanted to do, and I always believed that I could do it myself."

That belief in himself was the first step. Next came the hard work, as well as a bit of doublespeak.

Pearson's mate in the UK ran a party in Sheffield set to host the massive trio, Meduza, which he saw as an opportunity to launch his career. And so he inflated the truth a bit, claiming he knew how to DJ when he didn't. In truth, he had never even touched a controller.

So, three weeks before his DJing debut, Pearson bought a Pioneer controller and practiced on it every single day before the gig.

He took that same no-holds-barred approach when he was signing his first track. Rather than targeting specific labels, he went on Labelbase, a resource for artists to find the contact for record labels, copied and pasted the demo submission email from every label, and sent his track to them all. (He claims the number was in the thousands).

Of course, those methods are not the only way to get your first gig or get your first track signed. But the common thread is hard work. Hustle. And Pearson applies it to every aspect of his career as an artist.

"I think it's about the commitment and the desire to want to do it. I work every day from seven in the morning till twelve at night [on] something to do with music."