ABOUT
James Gillespie.
I spent 19 years at Sony Music, ending as SVP. Now I coach and advise people in music and the creative industries. I've spent my whole life in music, so I can tell them what I know when they need it, and the rest of the time I ask the questions nobody else will.
CHAPTER 01 · 1988 to 2005
Before Sony.
I've worked in music since I was 18. I spent my twenties making electronic music in London in the 1990s, deep in the underground party scene, running an independent label, releasing my own tracks, DJing and being a remixer for hire. I had a decent run but when it dried up I joined the Official Charts Company and launched the UK's first download chart. That's what got me embedded in digital music, and gave me a real passion for what was coming: downloads, then early streaming.
CHAPTER 02 · 2005 to 2024
Inside Sony.
I joined Sony Music in 2005. Digital was considered fringe. CDs were still the serious money. It wasn't fringe for long.
When I arrived the industry was reeling from file sharing and didn't know whether it would survive. iTunes was a dim glimmer of hope, a legitimate version of what people had been getting from LimeWire and Kazaa. It also unbundled the album, which broke the way the business had made its money, and nobody wanted to change. There was a lot of resentment towards iTunes. My job was to get a sceptical business on board with the thing that was disrupting it. It took ten years before the industry went back into growth, off the back of Spotify really starting to work. Then streaming turned everything upside down again. Then TikTok, the biggest disruptor of all, because it took control out of the labels' hands. I was in the room for all three.
Over 19 years I was steadily promoted: manager, senior manager, head of, director, senior director, VP. The last three years I was an SVP, first in Digital in 2021, then Commercial Partnerships from 2022 to 2024, running the UK relationships with Spotify, Apple, Amazon and YouTube. Along the way I worked on everything Sony released, with many highlights. I devised the global digital campaigns for all of One Direction's albums and across the whole of Calvin Harris's career, and worked on every Beyoncé album. For about ten years I was also the person any new digital business came to if it wanted to work with Sony in the UK.
The hardest part was never the strategy. It was holding a team together in an industry that constantly needs to learn how to do business in a new way. If there's one thing I did well across the whole run, it's building people who ended up better than me at the parts of the job they took on. One of them came in as an intern and is still there as a director. Music Week gave the team the Best Sales Team award in 2024. That was theirs, honestly, not mine.
CHAPTER 03 · 2024
The letter.
I went in one day thinking I was signing a new deal. I walked out with a letter in my hand. Redundancy. The clean version of a story that was neither clean nor rare that year.
What I hadn't prepared for was the Tuesday that came after. The diary went quiet. Someone asked me "so what do you do?" at a dinner and for the first time in two decades there wasn't a clean sentence for it. Twenty years of who I was, built on top of a title, and the title was gone. That was the room I now work in for other people.
CHAPTER 04 · 2024 to present
The rebuild -
still in it.
After Sony I needed to decompress, so I spent a couple of months in the jungle in Peru, on retreats and on my own. Another corporate job never crossed my mind. I'd had enough, and I knew there were other things for me to do that would make me happier.
What I worked out in the Amazon was that the most rewarding part of the job had been working with talented people and helping them get to their potential. The music had become secondary. I'd had a good experience with a coach Sony gave me near the end, and that had stuck. So I started mentoring. My first coaching client was a friend's daughter who'd been promoted very fast into a job she didn't want and was about to walk out and blow up her career. I'd found the thing I wanted to do next. That took me to Barefoot, where I trained to ICF Level 2 in 2025. Alongside that I took on consulting work through GLG and Coleman, and guest lecturing on the Westminster Music Business MA.
AI didn't land on my desk at Sony. It has since. The way I put it is that the music industry is a game I've spent my life playing, and AI is the expansion pack. I've been learning the new missions, writing about them, and advising founders who are building with it. I'm also building an AI tool of my own that puts a business idea in front of a panel of expert thinkers.
And I launched my practice, James Jamil.
I spent 19 years building new things inside a major and holding a team together through three industry shifts. Now I do that for the leaders and founders standing where I stood.
WHAT I ACTUALLY DO
Three things.
· I work with senior people in music who are facing a real challenge. Sometimes it's been sprung on them: the job they've done for years isn't there any more. Sometimes they've just realised something's not quite right. I'm not much use to someone who only wants the next promotion. I'd rather work with a client who's grappling with the bigger questions. What's going to make me happy? What do I actually want from my career? Do I want what I'm told to want, or my own path?
· I advise founders and companies, on retainer or for a single piece of work, with a straight read on the business and the industry it has to work with.
· I write and I lecture. I've been surprised how much I like both. The writing has helped me make sense of my professional life as I look back on it. The lecturing takes me out of my comfort zone, and I love the energy a room full of smart young people gives off.
If any of this reads like your Tuesday, let's talk.
30 minutes. Just a proper sounding board for the moment you're in.