[INTERVIEW] Nicholas Gunn Talks AI In Music, Upcoming Album 30, Blue Dot, And More

Sit down as we talk to one of the most special artists working today in the fields of Electronic music.

Today, we have someone very special in our interview space. We welcome a man who’s not only a legend in the Dance spectrum, but also in music as a whole. If I told you, arguably his greatest hit ever came at a time when Google wasn’t even a thing, and that he sold millions of physical records at stores, you may barely begin to grasp the legacy of the man before us today. We’re glad to have spoken with Nicholas Gunn himself.

And it couldn’t have been at a better time, given the fact that this good man is putting out his latest album (of which he has MANY), as soon as next Friday. Titled 30, it will look back on his vast experience and time in the business, while also looking forward to the future, portraying an ideal blend of his sounds from all eras.

Foreword

A multi-talented musician, songwriter, lyricist and producer, Nicholas Gunn has been involved in music for over three entire decades, and has made a name for himself for the mastery with which he makes his instruments talk, in rather poetic ways, to say the least. With a classical music background, Gunn has evolved his sound to embrace genres such as Trance, Melodic House, and Chillout, but only after a greatly successful time producing New Age.

At a time when machinery was heavy, expensive, and you had to rent studios to get real instruments recorded on tape, Nick committed to his long-time passion, music, and produced one of the best-received pieces of music of the 90s, 1995’s The Music of the Grand Canyon, an epic album comprised of eleven very moving, very real tracks featuring strings, drums, his signature flute, and uncountable buckets of goosebump-provoking emotion. The album, which turns 30 in just a couple of days, went on to sell close over a million copies, marking Gunn’s entry into the annals of music history.

And somehow, something happened along the way that ended up with Nick branching to Electronic music. For about ten years, he’s been producing music far and wide, gracing your ears co-producing tracks you would’ve never expected, and even founding and managing his own family of Electronic labels, Blue Dot. Does this not naturally spark the “how” in your curiosity? Because it certainly fueled mine.

How did he go from New Age, World music to Dance? Why did he ditch “real” music for “fake”, digital music? Or is that even as binary as I just put it? Why is he putting out an album on the exact 30th birthday of his largest hit to date? What does Nick have to do with Armin van Buuren, Aly & Fila, Richard Durand, and Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Southern Sun’? What’s going on with AI taking over the music space? Hold on tight, ladies and gentlemen, and buckle up, as we talk about that and much, much more, with the man himself, Nicholas Gunn.

As was the case with Tony McGuinness back in the day, this interview was quite the long and fruitful one (which we couldn’t be happier about), but we understand it might be a tad discouraging to try and find certain topics. So, below this paragraph, you’ll find a little table of contents, so you can easily go and click the part of the dialogue you wish to read. That said, we strongly, strongly advise you read the whole thing through, because we had the most amazing and interesting chat. Wisdom pours out of these pages.

Table Of Contents

The Interview

(Please note, the bolded text represents a question, while the paragraph(s) following it represent Nick’s answers.)

Firstly, thank you much for joining. It is an honour for us to have you.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Let’s kick off with the basics. You are quite an experienced producer, and not only a producer, but also a composer, first and foremost. Could you provide us with some insight into when your journey as a composer began? Please let us know why and how you got into this world of making music.

I started playing the flute when I was six. My grandfather was a professional musician. He was a guitar player in the Felix Mendelssohn Orchestra and the Hawaiian Serenaders. I swear to God, it was cool, and my mum figured if his dad — my Granddad — was going to be a professional guitar player, maybe one of her kids would have some musical talent. They came to me at that young age and asked me, “What do you want to play?”. I remember seeing a flautist on TV the night before playing this golden flute. His name was James Galway, and I immediately said the flute. There and then began this very long musical journey of learning how to incorporate the flute into creating music.

It turned into an extraordinarily long journey, trained classically at the Royal Academy of Music when I was a wee lad. Between six and eleven, I was tutored by Mick Judson from the Royal Marines band, and he would take me up to London occasionally for exams. Then I moved to America at eleven. I was already quite proficient in understanding classical music. I had my musical background and foundation in melody and composition. It was ingrained in me. It was like learning how to walk. I didn’t think about it twice. Music was my life.

Unfortunately, with pre-teens stuff, it turns out the flute wasn’t cool. It turned into a big bullying thing for me and a very difficult curve in my life, because when I moved to America, suddenly, I became this “young British kid who plays the flute”. I had a bullseye on my head for bullying. I immediately took up drums and percussion because it was way cooler. That’s how I expanded my musical knowledge outside of the flute. I picked up drums in a couple of 80s bands, one more glam, the other more modern pop, and I played in every bar on Sunset Boulevard between the ages of 17 and 21. I played Madame Wong’s, Gazzarris, The Troubadour, The Whiskey, etc.

Now I had rhythm knowledge, and along with this previous classical training, I started diving into what’s called counterpoint melody, how melody comes together in multiple variations to create one, polyphony. Then I started getting into acting and modeling, which sounds unrelated, but I bring it up because it’s important. An entertainment manager one day came to me and said, “Look, you should be doing some modeling and some acting. You’re close to LA”. And I did, and I made a tidy little sum of money in one year, and I went out and bought all my first recording equipment. Back in the day, it was all open-reel recorders. Back in the late 80s, early 90s.

As soon as I bought my first recording gear, I said, “screw this, i’m not going to be in acting anymore. I want to be in the real artist talent pool”, coming from the soul, don’t want to pretend to be anyone else, which for me was music. It turned into recording my own ideas using flutes and percussion, and world music was hot in the early 90s.

And I then went down this convoluted, winding path for five years of trying to get my stuff out there and signed. You’ve got to remember, this is way before digital. This is when record labels still ruled because the only way you could get distribution to brick-and-mortar retail was through record labels.

And I had to build my way through that maze, which is much more difficult than today’s music industry. It sounds cliche to say it, but there’s a lot of old school dudes like me out there that would say, “Oh, man, you kids have it easy nowadays, you have no idea what we would go through”. It’s true, but the reason why it mattered is that you had to learn to work a hell of a lot harder and more efficiently to find success, and once you did, it was a different success and a different sustainability, because the music industry was much more profitable. That brings you to when I first got signed.

My career is an odd one. You won’t find a guy who’s been 32 years in the business, started in instrumental and classical, sold millions of records in the 90s, doing world instrumental music, and then transitioned to electronic in 2016. I sold a million and a half records by ‘97. That was many, many years before Spotify even started and we were walking into physical retail, Tower Records, Borders Books and Music, Barnes & Noble and Blockbuster Music where you would put on the headphones, listen to a track and you go, “I want that CD” and buy the whole record because you loved one track. Those were the days, man. Big money days, too. There was a lot of money to be made in the music industry then.

I had the fortune of living through a couple of those years in the early 2000’s where I would walk into a record store (RIP) and listen, scan the barcode, and listen to a snippet of the tracks. That was great. It was beautiful; it forced you to slow down.

Yes. You had to go into the store. God, I miss those days. I get goosebumps talking about it right now because it forces you to take the time to walk up to this listening station, put on a pair of headphones, look at the cover of a record, look at the name on the record, maybe you say, “Oh, I think I heard of that artist”. Then you start listening to the record and you go, “Man, that song is killer”. Then next thing, you’re buying the whole record. It’s called an impulse buy, and that’s what we used to call it in music marketing, but those days are long gone.

Unfortunately, music has been morphing into a background, secondary thing for many of us, prioritizing optimization, efficiency, and all that stuff. No time to stop by a record shop and wasting time carving a space in your day to listen to music when you can always do it on the go.

It’s an interesting marketplace now because streaming doesn’t have a ceiling, which also suggests why there are one hundred thousand uploads a day to the stores. There are massive problems with that mechanism and how it’s operating currently. That’s precisely one of those things that we never experienced in the 80s and the 90s and early 2000s because there was only much room on the shelves. Gatekeeping, effectively. The labels controlled the distribution of CDs. The retailers controlled the placement and the direct-to-consumer buy of those CDs, and there was a limit to what you could efficiently move every single day. Nowadays, you can do whatever. The ceiling is not even there.

That creates a whole other slew of problems. I’m a music guy, but I’m a business guy too, and the reason why I’ve stayed in the game is because of my love for the music business and as you can probably already tell, I segway to that topic quite fast when talking about my artistry, because it’s the only thing that’s kept me alive and creating: understanding what I’m doing.

Which is, precisely, one of the questions that I had for you. Why did you keep working on this? Because as you say, you’ve been through a lot, you had The Music of the Grand Canyon as your million sales hit in the late 90s… You could’ve called it quits much earlier! Although I have to say, I discovered that album very, very late, some five years ago, and I love it.

You’re 25 years late, man! [laughs]

I know I am, but it tends to happen to me. I discovered trance later on as well. During the golden age of it all, I was still using a pacifier. I was young back then.

It’s cool because The Music of the Grand Canyon is a timeless record; it doesn’t belong to a genre. Music that does not belong to a genre is very tricky to do, because a lot of artists nowadays are pigeonholed, trying to get on an X or Y playlist. Playlists will only place music that fits. As a result, artists today can’t even develop their ability to think and produce outside the box. They’ve not been born into an industry that teaches them otherwise.

These young producers learn to conform and adhere to genre and trend, which is an absolute staggering shame when it comes to artistry. The real true artists are usually born because they have tremendous voices or tremendous compositional technique or something unique in production, where they’re putting all those elements together. It takes them to a whole other heightened level of music appreciation and music production, but most of the new producers are cookie-cuttering their music right now.

And it shows, it shows when you start shuffling about and listening to different stuff. You can’t make out an artist from a different one.

No, you can’t, and when those unique songs come along, you scream! I genuinely get excited as a label owner. I get super excited about fresh talent.

And you brought up an interesting thing because you said you didn’t discover trance until later. I discovered it in 2001 when I was divorced and of course, I went from being completely buried in a terrible marriage to then ending up in the middle of a dancefloor going, “What the fuck is this? This is amazing!”. I remember listening to Oakenfold’s ‘Southern Sun’ and those tracks were the first front runners of this thing called trance, and I remember being in the club, standing in the middle of the dancefloor, going, “Why am I not producing this music?”. I wanted to get involved, but I was stuck in exclusive contracts, and I couldn’t. I had an obligation to fulfill my agreements at the time.

It was a very difficult time for me. I had agreements with myself, and I also had agreements with distributors and labels and then I still had to decide in my mind, “Am I going to put in the work to do electronic?”, because you can’t wake up one day and say, I’m going to be good at electronic.

You had to do the work back then because 20, 25 years ago, it was all super expensive to get into the music business. You had to commit to it. You couldn’t download a DAW and start with your way and your native plugins, and your sample pack. It was much, much harder. You had to buy expensive stuff to get expensive recordings, because otherwise you would get crappy stuff. You would have to either buy machines or rent studios with all these machines to try and do everything that we do digitally together now, physically, and that takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort. Yeah, why?

That’s the thing. It’s interesting, isn’t it? because we can easily overcome hurdles when we have no other option. Human beings are extraordinarily elastic in the fact that when they have no other option, it’s amazing what they can do. The problem with music culture today is everything is so fucking easy that no one is doing anything groundbreaking.

Let me rephrase, I sound like an old man right now. People are doing groundbreaking stuff. I don’t want to come off as that guy. There are lots of wonderful producers and artists doing incredible music, but there are one hundred thousand uploads a day, and most of that is not great. Not thought out, thought through music, if you know what I mean.

Back in the day, I had a ninety-six-input analog console. I had a two-inch Studer deck. Those machines were 75k new. I rented one several times. I had a couple of other tape decks, but the big boy, the one I loved, I rented when I started making money in the late 90s, because I wanted to record on a 24-track open reel two-inch deck, two-inch tape running at 30” per second. I could get three songs on a $250 reel of Ampex.

If you do the math on that, you have to be ingenious. “Ok, I’ve got twenty-four tracks. I can put three songs on this reel that cost me USD 250. I got to put my thinking cap on and say, how can I make some great music?” and we would sync to MIDI. There was no digital recording; we would use SMPTE timecode to lock in an external computer device. It was primitive, but it makes you think outside the box. We’re elastic as human beings. If we’re allowed to dumb ourselves down, we become bright.

In a way, what you’re saying is that’s what the current industry lacks today, more challenges to overcome, since everything is simple. That the music is being simple, it’s a reflection of the lack of real difficulties versus back in the days.

Yeah, I think more technology has allowed things to get great sounding. I would say mixes are louder, more transparent, and more focused than they ever have been, but differently, you know? If you want to go for tons of headroom on a recording, then obviously, loudness is not what you’re talking about, but you have to play the loudness wars because unfortunately, you’re thrown into the pool nowadays. There is this balancing act in the studio. That is, how do I make my music sound modern with regards to mastering and technique, but also incorporate a sense of artistry and compositional factors?

That’s what I tried to do, and yeah, you can easily plug in any VST or any digital instrument and go from there, but to rely on it solely without live instrumentation is a difficult bridge for me personally to follow. Although electronic music often is strictly electronic, that doesn’t mean you have to do so.

And also, the branch of music that you make. Trance is best consumed with live instruments in the middle. There’s something magical about the piano, about a violin, about a flute, about something that breaks all the synthy stuff.

When music gives us a sense of grounding, we realize we’re human beings, especially now in an AI-driven world, we have this feeling that a human is behind it, and let’s face it, the first genre to fall victim to AI will be electronic.

Look, this is no offence to all the trance producers, the melodic house producers, the chill house producers, the dance pop producers, but everyone is using the same textures and rhythms regurgitated over and over again, and that’s great because it works. That’s a formula, but that’s precisely a path in a formula I don’t want to take. I will always put my real instrumentation, my background, my musical heritage into my music, and I think that’s why I’ve had success at this point in my career in electronic.

Before moving on, I want to take a step back and take five minutes to address bullying. It stuck with me when you told me you’d become the bullseye for bullying, for playing flute, and coming from a different country. I also suffered from bullying back in the day, and when you look back in time, the reasons are absurd. Back in the day, I was shamed for being good at school. I had good grades, and I loved studying, and that was my crime. Yours was playing the flute. That hits deep.

Yeah, but it shaped who I am. It made me want to overcome those odds even more. I have a great sense of empathy in my music, and I think that has a lot to do with it. Some people ask me, “Your music is deep, top lines and lyrics, how do you write such deeply heartfelt music?”. It’s suffering, man. I can laugh it off nowadays, but it is true.

I’ve got a track on the mix desk I’m finishing right now, and it’s called ‘Don’t Cry’, and it’s about my bullying days. You’ve got to get to this place in your life where you come to terms with what happened. You look at that little kid who was bruised and injured and say, “You’re a big boy now. You’ve accepted that this happened to you. What are you going to do about it? You can’t cry anymore”. You’ve got to turn it into something that is productive.

It took me most of my life to get there, in all honesty. It was pretty bad for me when I first moved here; there was some severe bullying, and I was a sensitive kid. That didn’t go well together.

It was the same for me. I also got into music early on. I was studying saxophone back in the day, and that made me a more sensitive kid. As I remember feeling that these lessons after school, I felt quite at home, and that was one of the few points in the day where I felt …

Safe.

Yes.

Safe. When you feel safe, that’s when you emote and talk about the experience, because up until that point, you’re suffering in it, and you’re reacting to it, and then when you get in that safe moment, which is music for me, which is the studio for me, that’s when it all pours out of me. I’m safe, I’m in my studio right now, this is my safe haven, anything that happens in here is something that I can fully control.

That’s an amazing reflection. I didn’t think I would get to talking about this, but yeah, here we are. That’s the magic of talking, of real talking. Now, we’ve gone through why you moved to electronic music, which still blows my mind, because after selling many records, why would you want to try something that’s less… Real, in a way. To go from making real music with real instruments to fake music, fake instruments, and clubbing. What sparked that in you? Was it that very night when you told me you were listening to ‘Southern Sun’?

Yeah, there is no mistaking the emotional energy that you can get from well-constructed dance. Electronic music has something to offer that’s highly unique. Any genre, hip-hop has its own thing, instrumental, and classical have their own thing. As I mentioned, I played drums, and a great part of that experience was drum circle stuff that was very hypnotic, i.e., a trance, and this is what happens in dance music.

Repetition, even though it can be simple, is hypnotic and transformative. I heard that for the first time in the clubs, set forth in a more euphoric fashion with trance and these great vocals. I’m a big vocal fan, always have been. When I heard these wonderful vocals, I thought to myself, what a unique way to express a whole new style of music. What was coming out in the early 2000s was pretty damn special.

You’ve got a new album coming out pretty soon, if we could talk a bit about that one. It’s called 30. Ahead of time, we already know that it’s connected to a very important piece of your musical history, but could you let us know a bit about it? Is it purely electronic? Is it purely non-electronic? What is it? Talk us into it.

It’s me. Here’s the thing. Everyone thinks I’m something. Yeah, I’m me, and this is what I sound like to the end of time. I don’t care much about genre. I’ll do it all. You’ll hear a trance collab, as I have one foot in trance. My melodies and vocals that I’m producing are suited for it, and because i have a deep love for it that goes way back but then I’ve got this whole other side of me, which is instrumental, which is more ambient, tribal, flute-based, guitar-based, stuff you heard on The Music of the Grand Canyon. Then there’s a part of me that’s enjoying what’s happening in chill and chill house, which combines my old sound with my new sound.

30 represents all of that, and it is a celebration of the 30 years I’ve had since my biggest record came out, The Music of the Grand Canyon. On August 1st, this year, 2025, it will be exactly 30 years since that album came out, and it was a huge success in a niche market. That record was an instrumental record, a flute-based instrumental record, that did over a million units before ‘97.

Through the album, I tell the stories that have happened to me through music since 1995, how I got to where I’m at, and the different styles I’m now representing. It’s all in there.

Are there any recreations of old songs of yours, or is it all new?

100% new. I don’t want to do any recreations anymore. I’m not big on that. I tried that for a period of time. I found it to be quite cheap. It’s difficult to make a great song better. Somebody can remix it better, but there’s always something that happens when the artist tries it. It’s never the same. It’s the ugly version.

There’s a certain magic in a record born from scratch that you damage when attempting to recreate. You as a producer have your formula, and you trust that if a song doesn’t sound right at a given stage of creation, or you go down the wrong path, you stay with the track, undo all the wrong parts and go back to what you loved, and then decide where it’s going to go again.

This way, you stumble into mistakes that turn into absolute pure magic. That is the ultimate production process, because if you’re not doing that, if you’re not trusting that technique as the foundation, then your stuff ends up sounding like everyone else. There is no originality. Originality is always born through the magic of mistakes and trusting the process.

About originality, my first proper interview here in EDMTunes was Ferry Corsten, and I recall we talked about this very topic. He told me that today’s world is full of template music, and I’ve never heard truer words.

I don’t want to sound unappreciative of young talent, but there are instant gratification problems in the music industry. Why not go write your part? Why are you going to go find a template that somebody else created, grab it, and throw it into your music? That’s stupid to me. Why don’t you take the time to be more studied in what you do? There is a saying that to be excellent, you must understand it first, and you must perceive it first. The problem with a lot of new producers, and even more established producers, who are following templates and a cookie-cutter approach, is that they don’t understand that part of being excellent means doing the work to learn how to become proficient and original.

Learn how to play the piano, learn progressions, learn chordal theory, and learn counterpoint theory. Take the time. It may only take a few months. It may take a few years, but why not have that underneath your belt? Because every single time I work with a producer or a musician who has training, their choices are far better. Always.

I think today’s world teaches us that time is an enemy, and that’s the thing. The longer you take doing something, developing craft, being professional, and good at something, the further you are falling behind the optimal path. I think that’s the main issue for people today getting into the music industry, trying to grasp everything very, very fast to start getting out there and making progress, seeing their numbers, seeing their metrics go up, seeing their playlist placements.

But yeah, we’ve left behind the real magic and the real pleasure of learning the craft.

Yeah, it’s a weird climate today. If it wasn’t for Spotify and their vanity numbers. They were the first company to show monthly listeners and daily streams, it was pure genius, because we all know that the vainest person in the universe is the musician. Show their numbers to their audience and their peers, and you’ll have them spending money on payola till they’re blue in the face. You’ll have them spending ridiculous amounts of marketing dollars towards the store itself, which is what they do nowadays, with all of these different marketing gimmicks but then you also have a system that’s now rife with payola, with third-party playlists that are bought and paid for, with bot streams, with all these things, because the artist wants to have their numbers look good. If those numbers weren’t visible to anyone, no one would give a shit.

Exactly. The next best thing was DJ support, which is far more tangible in the industry.

Man, back in the day when none of the digital stuff existed, we would hope for spins on the radio, and you wanted to see your records on the shelves in the store you could walk into. That was the biggest.

There was Billboard Magazine, which is a trade that is a certifiable, verifiable method of registering sales, and that’s always been there but it usually belonged to the elite, the ones that were on the top 200, the ones that were the big artists but now that every single artist can see their numbers everyone is jonesing for this numbers game, it’s a system that is madly out of control. The egos are crazy. Everyone’s looking for attention in all the wrong places.

I can 100% go with that view of yours. I share it as well. Back to your catalogue, and since you’ve also been a co-writer of a bunch of successful tracks in the genre, is there any particular piece of music that you have a special love for, some record that every time you remember it or listen to it, it draws back a smile on your face like no other?

In electronic, yeah. I wrote a couple of songs for my boys. I have a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, and the first song I wrote was for my seven-year-old. It was a song called ‘Fallen’ and Richard Durand did a remix that became quite a big trance tune in electronic, particularly A State of Trance. It’s become a beloved song in my heart because I wrote that for my son. I looked at him yesterday, I’m not joking, and I told him, “Sweetheart, this song has done millions of streams, and I wrote that for you”. Now he can read and write. He knew I wrote the song for him, but he didn’t quite absorb it, and I said, “These are the lyrics I wrote for you”, and he looked at me with these eyes, and he realized that I was telling him in those lyrics how much I loved him. That’s insane. Talk about legacy. That’s the shit I want to be remembered for.

Another song that marked me was born when Armada came to me in 2020, and said, “Hey, can you write some tunes for our guys?”, so I dug into a tune called ‘For All Time’. I knew a girl living in Hawaii named Kazi Jay. She wasn’t on the radar, but she had an amazing voice, and she was a family friend. I remember reaching out to her, and she demoed the track for me. I comped the track in the studio and I sent it off to Tanner, A&R at Armada. Armin, Aly & Fila picked it up in 12 hours, and it went on to be tune of the year in 2021, and that’s a big deal for me, because I was not releasing records in trance at all at that time.

Other memorable instances came while I was writing songs with Avira, Giuseppe Ottaviani, Protoculture, Luke Bond, and a few others on Armada. I’ve had Sam Martin and Diana Miro sing my parts, and Alina Renae, my vocal go-to. She’s done many, many tracks with me. She’s been amazing.

That sounds amazing. I guess we’re only leading the conversation to this. Could you talk to us about Blue Dot? Your family of labels. How did they come about? How did Blue Dot come about, first of all? And how did Blue Dot Trance come to life?

I’ve always had a great passion for the business of music. I feel that the only way an artist can truly succeed is if they know their business in music. They need to take the time and the energy to understand everything they’re doing.

That fueled my desire to be a label owner. I had a label before from 2001 to 2009 that became a frontrunner in instrumental world music, which was my originating genre. I represented several thousand titles, several hundred artists in the world, and new age styles of music, but I made some big mistakes. Gravely, I was starting a label during a time when CDs were on decline and digital was starting to take over.

And back then, there were two different types of contracts with artists: digital rights and physical rights. All of my contracts were for the physical distribution rights of those records to standard record retail. I remember I did get some digital rights, and we were moving in that direction, but not quickly enough, and not efficiently enough.

I sharpened my teeth in business with my previous label from 2001 to 2009. Then Borders Books and Music went out of business and returned a million dollars worth of product in one week, our records included, and it destroyed me. It put me out of business, and it was brutal because I’d worked nine years on this label, and I’d mismanaged the forward-thinking idea of where it needed to be.

I made some big mistakes, and then it crushed me. It really crushed me. In 2009, I lost everything. I lost my wife at the time. I lost my catalog to the bankruptcy courts. I lost everything, and I had to take a deep breath. I drank a lot. I partied a lot. I did everything I shouldn’t have done a lot, but in that deepest, darkest hour, I found myself. The Phoenix rises out of the ashes, as they say. I then had the opportunity to do exactly what I always wanted to do, electronic music. In 2017, after licking my wounds for some six years, we started Blue Dot.

Blue Dot at the time was a shell because I got my copyrights, master rights, and publishing rights back from the bankruptcy courts. After all, it was my living. Thank God. All that mess was behind me, and mind you, I talk openly about what some people will call a failure because we all go through struggles, and if you can’t talk about that struggle openly, it makes other people feel they fail at something they don’t succeed at. That they are a failure. Failure is integral to our success. The more I can talk about how I fell on my ass and my face, I think people should hear that because they can realize you can turn it around. Got to learn from it.

And by 2016, I was back into doing something I wanted, which was electronic music. I’d teamed up with a buddy of mine who I met in Chicago, and we were messing around with an act called Limelight. That guy was Tanner Wilfong, who became a very dear friend of mine. Tanner went on to Armada. He’s now Armin’s A&R, who I mentioned recently when talking about ‘For All Time,’ and he has become very successful. He’s a brilliant guy, very talented in many ways, and he was my original partner.

Shortly after, I started with more ambient works. I put out my past catalog that I owned back through Blue Dot, but it sat dormant for several years. I would put out a few works here and there, but then I signed a deal with Armada. I did Armada Music for a year and a half, releasing records with them, and then I said to myself, “You know how to do this. You’ve got the experience. Now you’ve got the passion back. You’ve got the stride back in your step. You’ve got the know-how. Now get serious about putting out more electronic on Blue Dot”.

We started releasing chill house and ambient, more down-tempo styles of electronic, which then grew into getting the support on ASOT from a couple of trancers we put out. That grew into me getting more trance collaborations. I started writing more. The previous writing opportunity with Armada led to many other opportunities that led to a bunch of collabs and new relationships formed. It all started coming together, and I thought to myself, why don’t we start putting out some of these collaborations on Blue Dot? We teamed up with a few of our trusted friends, such as Richard Durand, whom I had already done several remixes and a collab with on Armada, and I said, “Why don’t we put out something on Blue Dot?”. It became wildly successful.

And ever since then, we’re in cruise mode. We have over 100 releases this year across our four main brands. We have Blue Bot Trance, we have Blue Dot Downtempo, which is pretty much my original stuff, and everything is very similar. Then we have Blue Dot main, which is more of our exclusive artists, mainly my stuff, and then we have Blue Dot Chill, which is all the chill house and melodic house.

That’s one big journey.

It’s crazy. The thing is, you’ve got to have a ton of piss and vinegar, because at the end of the day, there’s a ton of mistakes that happen along the way. You make bad relationships, you break up with people, you form good relationships, you put out bad tracks, you put out great tracks, but you have to plow through it all, because at the end of the day, if you can keep the vision intact and your eye on the horizon, (and remember that the basis for the label is always quality, quality, quality) I think you can find success but it’s a brutal industry. I can tell you that I can’t imagine any label without a flagship artist surviving in today’s world; you have to have a flagship artist that supports the rest at first.

Wow. Now, let me process everything. I’m loving this, but my mind can’t keep up! [laughs] This is your day job, isn’t it? Do you do something else apart from music?

No, no, I’m fortunate. That’s what I mean by needing to have a flagship artist. I’ve got a great body of work that supports everything. This is why my heart bleeds for young producers. I make a good living. I don’t make a great living. I’m sustainable, but that’s 32 years of music over hundreds and hundreds of titles, and I own most of my stuff on my own label.

Yeah.

Let’s talk about the facts for a second, the scary, dark facts of the music business. I’m 32 years deep in this industry. I earned a million and a half in sales in the 90s, and I’m still parlaying from that. I own most of my works, both publishing and master side. That’s over a thousand masters and publishing. We have exclusive licenses with some of the big moneymakers, such as SiriusXM radio. We have multiple records always in rotation there; they are a wonderful partner. With all of that, we can keep our heads above water. That’s a lot to just keep your head above water. We finally have a business model that is sustainable, and we’re now in the growing phase. How in the hell does anybody get into the music business with a couple of masters and a couple of published titles in today’s climate?!

And it’s unfair because there’s no money to be made at first in streaming. It’s the greatest loss leader for every artist. It’s great for the brand, and it’s terrible for the pocketbook, which is the classic definition of a loss leader. The streaming stores will never tell you that. It’s a loss leader because by the time you’re done with the investment in the masters, putting it out on the stores with the other hundred thousand tracks that are going up every day, you haven’t really earned anything upfront if you don’t keep investing. It’s great for the brand, it’s terrible for the pocketbook. If you’re not a touring artist nowadays, putting out content is nowhere near enough.

And yeah, I don’t have a day job, because we’re fully committed to the label and fully committed to my career. I’ve never had a day job. I’ve invested and reinvested and was somehow able to swim through the murky waters and find the surface again, but there were terrible times, there were bad times, but it’s all behind me. I will never make the same mistakes I made again.

And how do you do it to go through your day and through your weeks, months, years, without feeling that this music thing is enslaving you? Because I’ve heard from many people that once you dedicate fully to music, once you commit to it, and you live from it, you profit from it, and you survive from it, there’s a very, very high chance that your mind will flip a switch and start treating music it a day job, losing the magic of sitting down and making music and expressing yourself and it turns into numbers.

You get past that. I was there once, but you do get past that. You have to stay in the game. You’re talking to a guy who’s been in the business professionally for three decades. That happened to me in year 15, when I had my first label, I was there. Even though the label for those first seven to eight years was very successful, before we saw the decline of record retail, I did feel enslaved. I felt I was at my least creative point in my entire musical career. I was pushing pencils, crunching numbers, and I felt I was behind a desk most of the time.

And yes, I was there, but you’ve got to stay in the game, and you’ve got to shake the sieve long enough to realize what part of the music industry you want to be in. Now, what I’ve done with Blue Dot is I built a team around me with my wife and folks we trust. My wife is on the administration side, running the record label, and I’m purely on the creative side, and I love to get up every morning and get to it. I’m passionate because I’ve gotten through that phase, and that is a real phase. It is totally real. The grind can feel like a chore, but it passes.

That’s a great point of view. I don’t think I’d ever asked that in such depth. Thank you! There’s a very important topic that we wanted to discuss, and I guess we’re getting to that point now, which is artificial intelligence. It is a very big topic nowadays. I would first want to start by hearing your thoughts on it, because it is a super powerful thing.

There are pros, there are cons, but what’s it with having a society based on people relying on technology to do stuff for them? Is it good? Is it bad? Where do you draw the line at where this “technology revolution” should overtake human functionality? Because that’s what it’s doing.

If you take away the money, you take away the desire to put AI out commercially. Copyright law in the United States already prohibits AI music from being copyrighted. If an AI vocal, for example, was created and the lyrics and the melody belong to artificial intelligence, you can’t register that track as a published track with the PRO’s. It’s not copyrightable. Therefore, it can’t be monetized as a published work.

That’s the first deterrent, and that is the best deterrent, because let’s face it, we live in an instant gratification society now. We already have tools, VSTs, and instruments on the computer and templates that allow a lot of producers to make a track in a day, in half a day, in a couple of hours, and put it on the stores and monetize it. Why wouldn’t they choose AI? They’re already halfway there. Three-quarters of the way there, even. Integrity, musical excellence, having a musical training, and understanding the complexity of what it means to be a real artist matter the most, but I’m not worried at all about AI itself. I’m worried about the current administration in the USA and what they are attempting to do with copyright law surrounding AI.

It may be controversial for some to hear this, but I’m not pointing fingers, I’m stating facts. Artificial intelligence uses fair use in copyright in order to train its machine. Fair use is a copyright determination on how protected works can be used. The clause has become a loophole to take copyrighted works, feed them into the AI engine as a way to learn, but normally, and rightfully, you would need a license to take that property or that content for the AI engine to learn. There’s a clause in the copyright office that stands in that way, and it’s called fair use.

And there are several big lawsuits between record labels and publishers against big tech, who control AI, that they’re saying that they can use our music without a license under fair use. The head of the USA copyright office decided a few weeks ago, and she put out a ruling saying that copyright law is there to protect human interest and not AI interest and fair use is in favor of human interest, and AI most likely, if not, would need a license to use human created music for the AI engine.

That person was then fired the very next day, and they were fired only for one reason, and that is because the big tech guys are looking for open intellectual property laws, which means that AI can use at will any person’s music without a license for the AI engine to learn.

It will infringe upon all artists’ rights, and all AI music in the future will have learned from our music without a license and proper compensation to us. That is about as corrupt as it can be. This is a big problem, and that’s what I’m mostly worried about. Outside of that, I’m not concerned about where AI is going itself, just the laws surrounding it.

That’s one hell of a topic. I’ve seen that takeover everywhere else with AI, but this bleeding into music production is very recent, I believe.

AI is a tool. It should be used as a tool to help, stripping audio, writing a paragraph or writing a statement, or writing a blog for a record. You can use AI to help you understand and write a better song, but ultimately, I think when AI starts writing and creating music fully, and you put it on a store and start making money from it, you take away the shelf space from real, creative music artists, and you’ve got a problem.

Copyright law, as I said, protects that from happening right now, but the reason why I’m not worried about AI creating music is that it creates a separate space. If suddenly, everyone is doing AI music, then the first thing to determine for protection is can the very same technology that created AI, detect AI. With that technology in place, we can only hope that there are checks and balances within the system that are always making sure that AI music is being recognized, whether it’s being uploaded illegally, or legally, or used or consumed in an illegal or legal fashion.

At the end of the day, and I’ve seen it before, people will always seek out human creations. What this does, in my opinion, it will define a much clearer market for the music industry. It’ll be a new market that emerges, and that is where people can consume and go to find real artistry and real human-created music. Lucian Grange is already leading the pack with Deezer. He started an online streaming platform for artist created music only, because they see most real artists have been in the business for a long time so they create a new space, where consumers and listeners will say, “I want real music, I don’t want the AI bullshit”.

Now, talking about this very topic, we’ve already gone through why it is impactful and harmful for real human artists, us, if you will, but why should the rest of the people care? Why should your average Spotify listener, your average nine-to-fiver who works at the office with music in the background, care about whether they’re consuming real or AI-made music?

They don’t have to. There’s a lot of people that are going to dig AI music and go, “That story was enough for me. It fits my life story. I made the song mine”, or “That song was created by AI and it was deep and profound enough for me and is going to fit my story”, but I think that human to human interaction when it comes to music created by humans, and being digested by humans, is a real tangible market that might grow out of the AI dilemma. It will take time, but I think it will get to listeners seeking out the real stuff and wanting to hear about the musician’s story.

Look, we want to be fans. You’ve got to remember this. Fans of music also love the artists. It’s not just about the music. They want to bond with the artist. They want to learn about the artist. They want to follow the artist’s story. They want to be a part of the artist’s life. They want to go to their shows. They want to do all those things. I think that’s the real driving force that separates the real creative music from the AI music thing, and I think I’ve come to realize, who am I to get in the way of technology? I don’t want to. I want laws in place that are going to protect my artistry from it, but I also want to see where the hole in the industry opens because of it, and what we’re speaking about right now is that hole. I believe that there will be a stronger market emerging in the days to come for real human creative music.

Now, I know we’re getting into a dystopian thing, but I guess we’re on a crash course towards that point eventually. You’ve talked about people in the future likely gravitating towards human-made music, following the story of the artist rather than their creation, but if it weren’t the case or if it was a bit harder and this didn’t happen, how could one as an artist differentiate oneself from machine-made content? Is it marketing? Is it melody? What would you say is it that makes a song intrinsically human?

Originality. I think the human ability to come up with original ideas is extraordinary. I think that playing a live instrument a certain way that the AI engine hasn’t learned is another great example of that. The problem with electronic music is that it is, by definition, all electronic, and it’s all been done on synths, and I’m sure the AI engine is going to grab it all and be able to create variations of it quite easily. I think if you can find a real instrument to incorporate into your world, whether it be your voice or whether it be the flute, the saxophone, the drums, the handpan, the guitar, the piano, that’s something you can make original and harder to learn.

If you start writing and producing extraordinarily original music, and the AI engine starts ripping you off, you have what’s called a better case for brand infringement. You have a whole new set of problems that will be difficult to overcome in a court of law, and what I mean by that is, let’s say, for example, the AI engine spat out a perfect Katy Perry song, sounds exactly like Katy Perry, and somebody put it on the stores. If that happened with an AI tune and somebody was monetizing it, you could have a triple threat lawsuit over brand infringement, which means the artist can say, “You can’t go out and sound like me without a license or permission. You can’t go out there and put out a song that pretends it’s me to such a finite degree that you’re blurring the lines between what AI is and I am”.

I think the more original you are as an artist, the stronger of case you have. Originality is everything and getting on stage and showing that originality in a live setting only supports the cause even more. If you can pick up an instrument and show people that you’re playing those parts, that is your sound, that you came first, you’re going to be fine. Stay the course, be highly original, play instruments that no one else is doing and if they are already doing it, do it in a way that no one else is doing it. But if you’re doing the same old melodic house and chill house and trance stuff, it’s going to be a steep, slippery slope.

Do you think that this dark cloud we’re approaching with blurring the limits between what AI is and what humans are, will somehow sieve the massive tsunami of template lookalikes we have today as artists?

Yeah, I think you’re correct in that assumption. I think using templates is the first stepping stone on the way to AI, isn’t it? because it’s cheating. Let’s call AI a different name for a second. Let’s call it cheating. Let’s go back on the path to cheating. It starts with grabbing sounds from Splice. It starts with grabbing drum loops that aren’t yours. It starts with grabbing progressions and textures, and parts that aren’t yours, that you never created, that you get to put those in your productions legally, resell, monetize, and so forth. I think all of us do that to one degree or another, because that’s the way everything works today, but use discretion and common sense and create your parts whenever you can.

But AI is the evolving momentum of that, the cheating momentum, the lack of artist integrity. It’s the instant gratification of “I need it now, and I want it this”. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either. In the same sentence here, I’m going to say what AI is great for. I think that in certain industries, AI music serves a purpose as a tool to help people get over humps, to strip audio out of pre-existing mixes. For example, I used AI on my ’30’ record to extract a drum sample I created in 1994 that I no longer had. I took it out of the mix through AI. I’ve done that several times, and I was able to do it with great success. It’s an amazing tool, and I used it in cahoots with stuff I owned, samples I owned, that I created.

It has and serves a purpose, but like anything, it has its limits, and it should not be used to take something from real artists that they’re already struggling to get, and that is the proper royalty rate and shelf space, and recognition for their own created works. It should exist separately and as a tool, so I’m not worried about AI, as some people may think I am. I put a post out the other day with regards to my concern over the copyright issues. That’s where my concern lies. It’s in the laws surrounding AI. It’s not the AI engine itself and what it’s capable of doing in the future. I’m not worried about any of that. I’m more worried about the laws surrounding it and the laws infringing upon my rights, because if I have my rights in the music business to preserve my material, then I’m not concerned.

Yeah, I see your point. That was a great section. Now moving on to another topic, I wanted to talk about albums a little bit. I spoke about this with Tony McGuinness from A&B last year when he released the Salt album. I asked him this question, and I wanted to ask you the same thing. Why do you do albums? In this world, and I hate to say it, but this is what the numbers say: albums are not cool. They don’t sell as much as singles. Marketing and algorithms don’t have a place for them today. Why? I want to understand that.

Prosperity, because we’re silly. We’re artists. An album is a tricky business, and I don’t recommend them either unless you’re a larger artist. At Blue Dot, we recommend always building a profile and an artist’s career on singles and EP’s. EP’s at the most. The algorithms, in part, work off the number of followers on the profile. For example, let’s talk about the largest store, Spotify, which has a 31% market share. The release radar algorithm only attaches itself to one track on any release for that given release day. If it’s an album, an EP, or a single, you’re going to get to be on release radar for one track. Putting a whole record out without doing any singles from it before that release date is silly, because you’re only going to get one track on release radar, which is where the majority of your 24-hour to one-week streams come from.

But the larger your profile, the more followers you have, the better your release radar, the better off you are. The only reason an album makes sense, in my opinion, is with an established artist with a very dedicated fan base that requires a certain level of commitment from the artist. There’s fan-artist interaction where the artist says, “Look, I’ve got a collection of songs, and this is the story behind that collection of songs. This is my artistry. This is why I’m doing this album”. If there is none of that, then what is the point?

This is what I always tell everyone. If you’re going to do an album, make sure it is thematic nowadays. Make sure you spend three quarters of a year, six months before the record talking about the theme and the singles and the mission and why you want to do a record and why the fans should love your record, because if you’re not doing it for those reasons, it’s pointless and you have to understand that a good majority of the tracks on an album nowadays might be throwaway tracks, but you do that because it makes up the whole of the artistic experience that’s important to the fan and to the artist and it has a lasting relationship. There’s something very transient about a single. Doing singles all the time cheapens the interaction between the artist and the fans. When you dig into a record, there’s a commitment between the two parties, and it’s in the ether. It’s not in the numbers. It’s in the commitment, the emotional commitment, between the artist and the fans.

I get your point.

You have to have real engagement to make an album. For example, Armin van Buuren put out a 50-track record, and he can. He’s got millions of followers on Spotify. I think he’s clipping along at 16 million monthly listeners. He’s got current listeners, and he’s got a legacy of fans. That’s the profile that can easily release a record and go deep, but if you’re a brand-new artist and you have no track record and you have no fan base, that’s the last thing you should be putting out.

If you’re thinking in a smart business sense, there is a time that’s better to do a record than not, but then there is the argument, “I want to make that commitment to my fans from the very beginning, and I don’t care what most of the tracks stream”. That’s also a good argument. There’s an emotional commitment, and then there’s a business commitment.

Yeah, it’s good to have you in here today because you have both.

I do whatever I want. I’ll be honest with you. I’m only doing albums now, but an album is made up of a bunch of singles. I put out as many singles as I can before the album comes out. I want to do what I want to do, and I want to spend six months talking about the record. I want to spend six months putting out singles that are coming out on the record, and I want to talk about what the music means to me, how it was born, what the lyrics mean, how it all came about, and how it all started.

All of these things are things AI wouldn’t do. Not with the same passion as humans. The stories would be lies. That’s all part of that real artist experience. A great direct answer to you, why would an artist do an album? Because AI wouldn’t. [laughs]. AI would do an album, but It’s not going to talk about it for six months in the same way as an artist would talk about it if they were, truly real about it, saying, “Hey, I wrote this track when I was in the bathtub” or “This person broke my heart and this is a song I wrote about them, and this is a song about when I was growing up”. You have all those stories. That’s human. That’s human stuff.

Amazing so far, it’s been incredible. Two final questions that I have for you that are more hypothetical. We have talked about past mistakes, but if you could go back to the past any amount of years that you want, five, ten, 15, and tell something to your past self, what would it be? Were you worried about something that you would you didn’t need to be worried about back then perhaps?

Gosh, that is such a huge question. I have a beautiful family now. I’m in love with my boys and my wife and everything we built together. It’s difficult for me to ever say that I would go back to something that wouldn’t have allowed me to land right here right now, but when it comes to music, and when it comes to the expression of my music, yeah, I would have a say.

I remember standing on those dance club floors in the early 2000s. It was a massive time in my life because I’d been divorced for the first time. Yes, I’ve been married multiple times. [laughs]. I remember going to those clubs, and I remember standing on the dancefloor and having my breath taken away listening to those songs. It took me too long to get into electronic. I think I would tell myself, “Do it now”. “Take the deals that you have, scrap them, take the financial loss, and work on your happiness”, because I wasn’t happy. I’ve learned in my musical life now to do whatever I want as a result of that, but back then, I was too afraid. Fear is the greatest deterrent; it’s a terrible thing, and I remember being on the dancefloor listening to ‘Southern Sun’. I played it again the other day, and I still get those goosebumps. This song, that moment, there’s an endorphin flow you get from that point in time in your life. I wish I could go back to myself right then and there and say, “Go produce this. Do it now”.

Intermediate question, because we’ve brought this back up and I thought I would have lost it by now, but since we spoke again about this. When I talked to Ferry, he told me the way he worked around his exclusivity deals was by making many aliases. That’s why he had Veracocha, System F, Gouryella, etc. Did you never think of doing that with yourself? Making another alias for electronic music?

I’ve thought about it, but some circles frown upon it. You can hear arguments from the stores, you can hear arguments from record labels, and you can hear arguments from artists. It is a great way to separate different styles of work from your name, but my music is my music. It’s never not Nicholas Gunn. Why would I create a different name? I guess the only way I would do it is because I’m trying to avoid something other than myself?! That doesn’t make sense. Perhaps I’m trying to avoid, most likely, the algorithms from confusing different genres underneath the same name?! That’s the number one reason why many have started using aliases on the stores, it’s because they’re afraid that the algorithm is going to get confused and not perform to the optimum. After all, they’re releasing different genres. I don’t give a shit. That’s why I’ve never done it. I’m me and that’s the end of it, right there…

And I’m a purist when it comes to artistic expression. I don’t want to hide behind something else for the wrong reasons. It’s not that it’s hiding behind anything else. It’s creating something else for unnecessary reasons. I think my music resonates through everything I do. The way I write, the melodies. If it’s Nicholas Gunn, it’s Nicholas Gunn. You’ll hear me no matter what the genre.

And final question. Suppose there’s someone in our audience here who looks up to you, your work, and your legacy. What would be one piece of advice you would tell them? Maybe it’s related to the question we discussed, maybe not, but what would be one piece of advice you would say for them to kickstart their career, or work up to the stage you’re currently in where you can do what you want without worrying too much about metrics, without worrying too much about what the rest will say, what the algorithms will catalogue you as?

It sounds cliché, but at the end of the day, seriously study. Be a great musician, be good at what you’re doing, and understand excellence by observing it. Be excellent by observing other excellent musicians. Some are born that way, but most of us have to work towards it. Once you arrive at a comfortable level, do something that is freeing. Express yourself musically and not worry about genre or trend, because I think the greatest artists in the world that transcend genre, the greatest singers, the greatest producers, the greatest instrumentalists, have never cared about genre. They use some genre as a foundation, but not much else.

Let’s take Coldplay. When Coldplay first came out, no one had heard a voice like Chris Martin’s, but now everyone sounds like him. Everyone who is against pop culture (because of ignorance) now hates Coldplay because everyone sounds like Coldplay. They were the original fucking GOATs. Let’s give them credit, right? We forget that the originators of a certain sound were the true GOATs. Those were the trendsetters of their sound. That’s what you need to strive for. Not only are you fighting the AI engine with that, but you’re also fighting the need to simply be famous and follow trends. That way, what you’re doing is you’re creating a massive legacy with authenticity. By the time you have a 20, 30, 40-year career, you’re plenty enough.

Look back objectively on your career and not feel embarrassed for one single bit of it. The worst thing is when you look back on your career and you go, “What the fuck did I do that for?”. You want to say, “At least it was original”, or “At least I did my best. I wasn’t following or copying somebody”. The worst thing is when you put something out and you sound like everyone else, and then 10 years later, the trend changes, and you listen back and you go, “Who was I? I was no one. I was everyone else”. It’s a difficult path because you need to make money. You need to get exposure. You need the resources. There are a lot of complexities, but at the end of the day, be true to your artistry and learn how to do it well. It’s that simple, but it takes talent.

That’s a wrap for the interview. I didn’t want it to end, but I’m thankful for everything we talked about. It’s certainly a golden nugget, this.

I appreciate the time because I’m getting older, and these opportunities allow me to talk about my history in the music business, and I want it to be heard. A lot of kids these days need to hear different kinds of voices, and it’s not always that I’m successful this year or I’ve been successful the last three years. I’ve been in the business for decades, and this is what it’s going to do to you, and this is what you’re going to experience.

-End of interview-

Final Words

Although I always aim the focus of my interviews in such a way that they end up being deep and special, this one was something else. Nick was such a warm, friendly guy from the get-go, and without us ever hopping on a call, ever, we ended up chatting for over 90 minutes. It just felt like regrouping with an old friend after years of silence.

You can tell Nick is an absolute genius, and the fact that he was as happy to be part of this interview as we were to have him here, is a pleasure and an honour. I truly hope you can pick some ideas from this piece, and make them yours, whether as lessons, inspiration, or simply as a way to find new music. Thanks so much for everything Nick!

Stay put for the awaited release of 30 next week. In the meantime, below you’ll find a playlist of some selected works of Nicholas Gunn, including originals and also co-productions. Until next time, folks! And don’t forget to stay tuned to our page for the latest news and views regarding our beloved Dance music world.