Why is SEO full of musicians?

When I interviewed Lily Ray in 2022, I asked her an unfair question: if she had to pick between DJing and SEO for the rest of her life, which would it be? She refused to pick. "It has to be both," she said. Then she said this:

"The SEO space is somehow filled with musicians. Like half my team are musicians, lots of drummers too. So I don't know if there's anything to that, but there's certainly a lot of overlap."

She's right about the overlap. Going back through every WojCast conversation, the musicians are everywhere. I think there's something to it, and it's more useful than a fun fact.

The line up

Lily's teenage band, Two Seconds, won a battle of the bands and ended up opening a festival that included the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, then opened for the Dandy Warhols. She picked college over the band, "thankfully". During lockdown she ran DJ live streams, asked for tips as donations, and passed the money to local businesses. "We generated like thousands of dollars." The whole conversation is in her written interview.

Jason Acidre played drums in a couple of bands before SEO and now produces the Filipino experimental rock band Magdalena. The band is half a tech meetup: one member works for an American agency, and the drummer was one of the first five certified Magento developers in the Philippines.

I should declare an interest. I make music too, mostly house and electronic stuff, and when Tim Soulo told me he'd been a drum and bass DJ, my reply was "I'm a junglist, mate." So I'm biased, but here goes.

What a band teaches you that a course doesn't

Hearing the pattern

Mike King doesn't do single syllable rhymes. As he put it, "I match a lot of syllables," and there's "a lot of structure" to how he writes. Then at 8:22 he made the link himself:

"So the way I wrote my rhymes is the same way I write my posts. Or I write my meta descriptions and page titles and stuff."

A page title is a bar with a strict word limit that has to land on the first listen. A drummer spends years feeling where the beat should fall and noticing when it doesn't. That's most of technical SEO: spotting the thing that's out of time in a crawl, a traffic graph or a template.

Practising on purpose

Mike again, on freestyling: "you train your brain. It's kinda like a muscle." Anyone who's played an instrument knows the deal. You get better by doing the boring bit slowly, over and over, until it isn't boring.

The famous research here is Anders Ericsson's 1993 study of student violinists, which linked skill to hours of deliberate practice. When Macnamara and Maitra repeated it in 2019, practice still mattered a lot, but the effect was "considerably smaller than the original study's effect size", and they couldn't replicate the neat staircase of hours to skill. Sounds about right for SEO too: reps count, but they aren't everything.

Playing for the room

Tim's favourite was drum and bass. But when he played at the nightclub, he told me in 2018, "I had to play like house music because you don't play like drum and bass every weekend unless you're in the UK." (More in his written interview.)

You can love your long form guide as much as Tim loves Hospital Records, but if the results page is full of quick answers and product grids, that's what the room came for. A DJ who clears the floor finds out in ten seconds. A marketer can take six months. It's the same idea as understand the context: the same words mean different things depending on who's in the room.

Getting feedback that doesn't flatter you

Music is brutal with feedback, and mostly the feedback is silence. Mike was honest about it: with music, "you put more into it than you get out of it", whereas in search "there's like a direct response to everything I do". His summary: "Everything resonates in inbound marketing, but not everything resonates in music."

If you've played to twelve people and a bartender, a flat week in Search Console doesn't scare you. You check what went wrong, you change something, you go again.

Not falling in love with the gear

This is my favourite. Marty Weintraub learned on ARP synthesisers with patch cords at Berklee in the 1970s. At 30:55 he told me what his professor said:

"What you're doing here is not important. Understanding how you figure out what's happening is the important part."

If Marty had specialised in the ARP 2600, he said, he'd be "curator of a museum or something". Earlier, he'd compared a marketer who depends on one platform to "a musician who is dependent on a guitar pedal". Swap "guitar pedal" for your favourite ranking tactic, or your favourite AI tool, and it holds up fine in 2026. The written version is in his Kwasi interview.

Standing on a stage

Mike credits performing for his speaking: "I'm used to being in front of crowds. I'm used to coming up with things on the spot." Lewis Howes, a former athlete rather than a musician, said something similar at 11:19: people who haven't done sports or music, "some type of practice of something with pressure situations", find it harder to go and run a business on their own. Pitching a client is a gig. So is the meeting where you explain why traffic dropped.

The less romantic answer

It would be nice to say musicians choose search because of all the above. Some of it is simpler. Musicians need money and they need websites.

Mike was the bluntest about it, in part two: "the only reason I got into marketing is because I couldn't support myself." Tim knew "by DJing I won't make a career for myself". And Nathalie Nahai was recording music in Atlanta when she realised she needed a website, which is how she ended up building them for other people.

So a band is often someone's first marketing job. You design the flyer, you run the page, you work out why nobody's coming on a Tuesday. Some people find they like that part.

None of them really left music, though. Mike told WeWork back in 2014 that swapping rhymes and shows for blog posts and conference talks was "the same song, just a different genre." And when I asked Marty to name the marketers in his imaginary band, his first pick was "Michael King. Michael King is a wonderful musician."

Five things to steal if you don't play anything

1. Read your page titles out loud. If it doesn't scan, it won't land. Mike writes them like bars.
2. Check the room before you pick the record. Look at what the results page already rewards before you decide on the format.
3. Practise one small thing on purpose. A weekly rep on something boring, like writing ten title tags or auditing one template, beats a yearly course.
4. Learn the patch cords, not the synth. When a tactic works, write down why, because the tool will change.
5. Get a gig. A talk, a live stream, a lunch and learn. Performing is a skill, and nobody gets good at it in private.

Marty had one more lesson from music, at 37:07: "being contrived doesn't work. The joke's on you as a marketer or a musician." Which is why I think a real story beats a polished one in both jobs.

As for Lily's question, whether there's anything to all the drummers: I think there is. But like her, I'm not choosing. It has to be both.