BUS4C004P~001
Sam Cockayne
24101381
Introduction
The artist that I have chosen to work with is Alex Ashman. Alex is a nineteen year old singer-songwriter from West Yorkshire, who is currently based in Durham. His first official streaming release came in 2025 as he released an album titled ‘Erosion’, however he has been releasing music onto YouTube for the past five years.
Alex was brought up being surrounded by music. Both of his parents, despite no longer working in music, have backgrounds in the music industry, with his Father formally being a radio presenter. In his own words, music ‘was always on in the house and in the car’, with Alex being exposed to a wide variety of genres, such as pop, folk, and classical from a young age. He attended his first ever music festival at the age of five and has been to one every year since, with exposure to live music no doubt influencing his own art. Alex’s first foray into playing music came at age seven when he started learning to play the piano, however he soon stopped and started to play the guitar instead. Alex doesn’t credit a particular standout moment in his life as being the trigger for wanting to make music, rather putting it down to a wide range of experiences in his younger life that meant ‘it was always going to happen due to a mix of nature and nurture’. The style of music that Alex makes, a combination of both indie music and folk, is often strongly influenced by upbringing, giving us some insight into why Alex makes the music that he does. For example, The Unthanks, a British folk band featuring two sisters from Northumberland, were in part inspired due to the parents of the two sisters being involved in the folk scene while they were growing up (Ayling, 2025). This example helps us to understand why Alex has gone into making music himself and that it is not an isolated case.
(@alexashman_official, 2025)
So far in his music career Alex has released two albums, his first album was titled ‘Fruit and Fable (Bedroom Sessions)’ and was solely released onto Youtube. His second album ‘Erosion’ was his first release that was available on streaming platforms and was engineered and produced by another singer-songwriter that he met at a songwriter’s event at a pub in his hometown of Ilkley. Alex has always made an effort to take advantage of the musical opportunities available to him in his local area. As well as the monthly songwriter’s event, Ilkley has a lot of open mics and an annual public festival. The festival, called ‘Ilkley Live’, takes place in July every year and aims to connect ‘musicians, audiences, and venues so that everyone in the town can benefit from live music’, with performances taking place in gardens, public spaces and pubs across the town (Ilkley Live, 2025). In his own words, Alex has ‘been welcomed to all of them, gaining much needed performance experience from a really early age’. He has also been intentional about looking for other opportunities available for young people, as he got involved with Breeze Leeds, an organisation that ‘offers opportunities, information and discounted access to a broad range of cultural and sporting activities, events and services in an inclusive, safe, fun, creative, and inspiring way’ (Breeze Leeds, n.d.).
When asked about artists that influence his music, Alex listed Sufjan Stevens, Noah Kahan and Lucy Dacus as the artists that have influenced him the most, as he finds particular inspiration in their lyrics and the themes that they explore. Stevens often explores religious themes within his songs, with his website stating that ‘Many of his songs have spiritual allusions’ (Sufjan Stevens, 2025). Noah Kahan has frequently explored themes such as relationships ‘alcoholism, homesickness, and acceptance of personal growth and change’ (Karna, 2024). Lucy Dacus’ music has been described as being poetic and autobiographical, often with a particular focus on love and relationships and how they can be ‘one of the best experiences a person can have, and yet it can also produce some of our most painful moments’ (Atwood Magazine, 2025).
Alex’s market appeal and style lays in a similar space to the artists that influence him. His style of music is heavily autobiographical, with the lyrical content of his music often being inspired by his own experiences and emotions, acting as a form of emotional release, much like Dacus’ music. Alex’s main market appeal is his introspective, emotional music. While the style of music Alex makes isn’t often found in the charts, artists that have gone before him in the genre have found major success by excelling in their niche, such as Elliott Smith and, more recently, Noah Kahan. The market for Alex therefore is mainly made up of people who already listen to music in that particular genre, and while he has made attempts to capitalise on that by covering songs by some of the aforementioned artists, it would be useful to look at how to further break into that scene, one in which live performance is often crucial. Another group that Alex could be marketable towards is young people. It helps that Alex is young himself, meaning that he knows how to relate to his peers and write in a way that allows them to understand and feel the message of a song.
Albums
One reason in particular that I have chosen to work with Alex is that his album ‘Erosion’ shows a huge amount of promise for a young artist. The album explores themes such as relationships, childhood and moving on in life. One particular song that would be good to look at is ‘This Time’, the second song from the album (Ashman, 2025). The song is particularly catchy, with a variation in tempo and a contrast between a crawling guitar part in the intro and the driving guitar playing as the song progresses. Lyrically, as a listener, the song appears to touch on themes of moving on and the emotions that come with that, both from people and places. Lyrics like ‘I can barely amount all the damage we’ve done here’ invoke feelings of leaving a particular place that holds a lot of memory and emotion, while other lyrics, such as ‘I’ll get out but I’ll see you around in the eyes of strangers I meet’ speak about being reminded of a particular person. The importance of this song is that it shows Alex’s song writing ability. While the lyrics will have likely been penned about particular feelings and experiences, this doesn’t stop the listener from being able to find relevance in certain lyrics and relate their own experiences to the song, showing maturity in the way Alex writes his music. This gives weight to the idea that Alex can be marketed towards people who often listen to emotional, introspective music, as well as being marketable to young people, the people most likely to be affected by topics like relationships and moving on from people and places.
One of the songs from Alex’s previous album, ‘Hold Me (Like Wine)’ (Alex Ashman Songs, 2024), can also be analysed in a similar way. The song conjures up an image of having complicated feelings towards someone, with lyrics like ‘when you look at me like that I knew I was through’ and ‘when you back track on the promises never made’. While still a beautiful song with relatable lyrics, it does leave less open to interpretation to the listener and is more narrative in theme. This can be viewed in two ways that are both positive, it can be seen as showing that Alex’s writing style can vary, as well as possibly showing a growth in song writing ability with the more recent song being accessible to more people without compromising on quality or subject matter. Sonically the two songs are similar, they are very stripped back, only consisting of vocals and guitar. This helps to solidify Alex in his particular genre as people who discover one of the songs should like the rest of his material, however it does suggest a possible need to diversify in sound.
Live
Alex has a voice, as well as a style of music, that translates powerfully to a live setting, which I think is a key area we can use for developing his product. The average audience that Alex tends to play to usually numbers between 20 and 100. In October 2025, Alex played a show at Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds supporting Beau Bowen, a group whose music is notably different to Alex’s. Beau Bowen describe themselves as ‘punchy, neoclassical, and semi-abstract’ (Beau Bowen, n.d.) with their songs often featuring synths and deliberately bizarre vocals, in stark contrast to Alex’s stripped back folk style. Despite not being hugely artistically similar to the headliners, Alex put on a great performance as an opener, bringing in a good sized audience that had just come to see him. His success in the live setting has given Alex access to more opportunities for publicity, helping him grow and develop his career. For example, in November 2025, he was brought on stage as a special guest during Jacob Alon’s set at the Albert Hall in Manchester supporting Kae Tempest. This is important as other artists in a similar field are recognising his talent and potential and are going out of their way to expose Alex to a new audience.
Being recognised and helped out by Jacob Alon is particularly important as they can be seen as having a similar sound and background to Alex. Jacob Alon’s music has been said to cut ‘through the air with powerful and haunting vocals, intricate guitar playing, and pensive, poetic lyrics’ (Wilderness Festival, 2025), something that could also accurately describe the music that Alex makes. The two also have a similar background in music, both learning to play the piano at an early age before moving onto the guitar. Alon released their debut single ‘Fairy in a Bottle’ in 2024 after dropping out of University to pursue a career in music. They spent time touring the folk circuit in Edinburgh, where they were discovered by Island Records, leading to their first single release and then an appearance on Jools Holland (Savage, 2025). This led to an album release, and on the 30th of May 2025 they released their debut album ‘In Limerence’ (Official Charts, 2025). Like Alex, Alon’s music clearly isn’t written with the intent of being commercially successful, rather it is a form of emotional release and expression that has become successful due to the fact that other people find it relatable and musically pleasing, a promising thing to consider when thinking about future releases for Alex.
Development Ideas
Since the two artists are comparable, we can use Alon’s experience as a template for developing Alex. While Alex does play music live fairly regularly, he could definitely be using the gigging circuit more effectively. As mentioned previously, Alex has done a lot of gigging in his home town of Ilkley and the surrounding area, however he hasn’t really branched out of this market. He is currently studying in Durham, meaning he has access to the music scene in the North East of England. One particular venue that would be well fitted for Alex to play in is The Globe in Newcastle. The Globe describes itself as ‘a well-established grassroots music venue that is known for hosting a very wide range of genres’, with two rooms, with capacity varying from 36 people seated at the low end, to 120 people standing being the most (The Globe, n.d.). A potential other venue for Alex to play is Little Buildings, also in Newcastle, which has a capacity of 60 people, while also providing full backline (Little Buildings, n.d.). These venues would be ideal for Alex to play currently, potentially supporting someone else, as it would help him break into a new area by regularly playing in venues in the North East, as shown by how successful playing in Edinburgh’s folk circuit proved to be for Jacob Alon. A website also gives us some insight into how Alex can break out of his local scene in West Yorkshire. The website, titled ‘How to Expand Your Band’s Presence Outside of Your Local Scene’, states that ‘Consistent regional activity’ is particularly important (Welsh, 2015). Regional activity in the north of England will be important as it will help Alex become an established music act in the area, and playing gigs across the area is important as performing in just one city could limit Alex’s potential fanbase. Just performing in one city could potentially lead to Alex being a victim of an oversaturation in market as concert goers could become too used to him playing and aren’t as excited at the prospect of seeing a new artist anymore, leading them to go elsewhere. Leeds and Newcastle would be particularly good to play in as they both have flourishing music markets, with the cities both ranking in the top ten best places for live music in the UK (EatDrinkMeet, 2025). Both cities also have large student populations and a busy nightlife, with Newcastle being home to ‘Around 45,000 students’ (UCAS, 2026), while Leeds ‘plays host to roughly 80,000 each year’ (Dillon, 2024). This is important as young people could be a key market for Alex, meaning he would have plenty of people who might feel a draw and a connection to his music in these cities.
Trying to get Alex onto some festival lineups is also a good step in developing him. The importance of festivals can be seen in Alex’s life as he has been going to music festivals since he was five, something that has undoubtedly caused him to want to become a musician. Festivals are great places to discover new acts, this is evidenced in the Ticketmaster festival report which states that at festivals ‘A third of fans add new artists to their playlists, many follow them online, and others spread the word to friends’ (Ticketmaster, 2025). One particular festival that Alex would fit well at is the Deer Shed Festival. Located in North Yorkshire, it is a ‘pioneering family-friendly music festival, offering an all-ages experience like no other, with live music, comedy, shows, theatre, sports, science workshops and much more’ (Kaboodle, 2025). One of the 2025 festival headliners was Kae Tempest, an artist that, as mentioned earlier, Alex has connections to, showing how Alex would be a suitable act to play at the festival with their focus on indie and folk music. However, while it would be great for Alex to play the festival, due to his current stature as an artist He is unlikely to be booked by the festival and the most likely way of Him getting onto the line-up is through applying to play. The Deer Shed do run an Apply To Pay program with EMI North, however it is very competitive, with over 700 artists applying to play in 2025 and only 3 being selected (Deer Shed Festival, 2025). So, while it would be great to play the festival, it’s also important to be realistic as it may not happen. A useful way of gaining some more traction for Alex in the live setting would be to list his gigs on Folk and Honey, ‘the most important folk gig listing site in the UK’ (Folk and Honey, 2025). Folk and Honey is a UK based website and magazine that allows for artists, venues and promoters to list gigs and events taking place all across the country. While it was traditionally focused on London, it now has pages on the website for the rest of the country which could be really useful for Alex as it enables us to market live shows to people who check the website as they are fans of live folk and indie music, people who are also likely to be fans of Alex.
While following the example set by Jacob Alon and focusing on performing live could be potentially very fruitful, a limitation is that Alon was able to dedicate the majority of their time and effort into doing this as they had dropped out of university, while Alex is still in university and plans to remain in higher education. Naturally, most of Alex’s energy will be dedicated to his degree, with music fitting around that for the time being, meaning that pursuing something like a supporting tour is difficult especially as he gets further into his degree. Even looking to the future, he has plans to potentially do a Masters degree, meaning that as well as putting effort into the live music space, other avenues for artistic development will have to be explored. The article mentioned earlier, as well as another website on breaking out of a local music scene, both mention pitching music as an important way of developing a music career. The second article states that people to pitch and send music to include ‘sync agents, music directors at radio stations, playlist curators, etc’ (ReverbNationBlog, 2020). Sync is a very important area in music currently, allowing artists to ‘to achieve mainstream success in music and reach a wider audience’ with artists such as The Black Keys and Jet gaining mainstream success through the use of their songs in media (Cramer, 2024). While this could be useful, it is potentially something for later on in Alex’s career when he has a more established presence. Pitching music to BBC Introducing, however, is a potential good step forward. BBC Introducing allows for ‘unsigned, undiscovered and under the radar musicians’ to submit music to potentially be played on local and national radio, as well as having the possibility to play on the BBC Introducing stage at either ‘Glastonbury, Reading & Leeds, and Radio 1’s Big Weekend’ (BBC, 2025). Artists to heavily benefit from the press they received from BBC Introducing include, Wunderhorse, Arlo Parks and Jake Bugg (Burton, 2023). The success that Jake Bugg saw as a result of BBC Introducing it can be a platform that can be helpful for solo-male singer-songwriters, which gives encouragement to try and use it to help Alex. Pitching songs to be added to playlists is a relatively easy way to potentially increase Alex’s streaming numbers. While artists can submit unreleased music directly to Spotify to be considered for their own curated playlists (Ditto, 2023), there are a number of websites that independent playlist creators use to allow for artists to submit their music for consideration for these playlists which can often be easier to get on to while also still being very beneficial (Ditto, 2025). One such playlist creator is Indie Folk Central, who have playlists on both Spotify and YouTube with all their accounts having over 400 thousand followers combined (SubmitHub, n.d.). On their SubmitHub page they say that they consider all submitted songs for all their playlists, with approved songs often being placed onto multiple. Their flagship playlist has over 50,000 saves (Spotify, 2026) however they are very selective when choosing songs to be added. Submitting songs to be considered by playlist curators like Indie Folk Central and others does have a good chance of resulting in some of Alex’s songs being placed onto some smaller playlists, which could still be very beneficial as any way of building up new listeners is a good thing, especially one like playlist submission which is relatively low risk.
One particular goal that Alex has mentioned he would like to achieve is playing with a band behind him. While an exciting idea, this could come with challenges. First of all, it would require finding band members. If we were aiming to have a permanent band that plays with Alex then a more consistent stream of live performances would be needed to ensure that it is a good prospect for the other musicians as well as Alex. Another option would be to hire freelance musicians on a gig-by-gig basis. Recruiting musicians for a project like this can either be done through in person networking, or by posting adverts on websites such as Join My Band and BandMix. A big issue when considering having a backing band is that they will need paying as ‘Freelance musicians aren’t playing your music for fun’ (Herstand, 2018). Alex has said that so far his music career has been financially demanding, this isn’t likely to be helped by having to pay extra musicians. However, despite the potential difficulties, it would open up some exciting doors. Having a full band could open up Alex to a new audience, while also allowing him to explore new musical ideas. He would be able to write new music that could contain more elements that vocals and guitar, which, while challenging, would allow for artistic development. An example of what that could potentially sound like come in the form of Lucy Dacus’ song ‘Big Deal’ (Dacus, 2025).
While the vocals of this song take the centre of attention, with the guitar complementing them well, the song definitely benefits from the other instruments involved. The bass does a good job of setting the pre-chorus apart from the verse, while the drums, in particular the work on the snare, help to drive the song sonically and rhythmically. Lyrically the song isn’t all that dissimilar to Alex’s music, with Dacus being an influence on his work, and the song dealing with topics of confusion, love and relationships (Genius, 2025).
Conclusion
In conclusion, Alex is a very promising young artist with a lot of room to develop and, in my opinion, a very high ceiling. He has already shown hard work, determination and creativity in his career and has seen rewards from this, being recognised by other musicians and flying the flag for his local scene. As mentioned earlier, there will be challenges in developing Alex’s career, notably that he is non-musical full time education and that there are costs and competition involved in growing as an artist. However these can be worked around and minimised by finding time to perform around his studies, pursuing more cost friendly ways of promoting Alex’s music and staying within the niche that Alex has, solidifying a fan base.
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