After joining us as tenants in 2010, the Phrased Differently team are familiar faces in our building: they’ve written countless chart-topping hits (over 60 Number 1 singles!) from the recording studios in our basement, expanding from one studio to eight since they joined us.
When the pandemic put live music, festivals and touring on hold, the Phrased Differently team moved to remote working, so after the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, they decided to mark their return to in-person working with a new space.
Now also occupying a second floor, light-filled office, we caught up with Hiten Bharadia, Founder and Managing Director of Phrased Differently, to hear how his business has grown from a single studio to an international music publishing empire working with the likes of Ariana Grande, Calvin Harris, Kylie Minogue, Iggy Azalea, Miley Cyrus, Britney, Demi Lovato, Olly Murs, Jonas Brothers, Tinie Tempah and Little Mix.
Rich Mix: Great to meet you Hiten – can you tell us about how Phrased Differently began?
Hiten Bharadia: Phrased Differently began in 2006, it was just meant to be a publishing company to represent my works as a songwriter. I was never intending it to grow and look after other writers, but I think when you go on a journey, you find a lot of people who want to be on that journey as well, and like-minded souls who love the way you represent yourself, and then they started joining. They wanted to be represented by Phrased Differently, so we started signing writers. It’s not a cheap business to get into, because we deal with intellectual property and so the only way I could really start this company was by selling my house. All of the equity I had, I invested into the company.
We started in my rented apartment, and then just two people in the office and three or four writers, and we grew organically. We were signing writers where it felt right when we met them, people that we really believed in but writers that wouldn’t normally be signed to publishing companies at that time. Normally you sign when you’ve got a hit, or songs on hold with several artists, and then the deal becomes very competitive. We couldn’t afford those kinds of deals, so we signed people very very early, just believing in their talent, even though they didn’t have any experience or success, and we just developed those writers, and invested our time into developing them.
Fast-forward to today, we have about 30 writers signed to Phrased Differently, we’ve got the studios downstairs for our own writers, five of those writers are in North America, two in Sweden, and the balance here in the UK. All of those writers, we signed from zero track record, bar one.
It was really hard, because there’s a lot of competition in the creative field, it’s really difficult to get in, there are a lot of barriers to entry, and a lot of time was spent building networks and getting to know the right people, and knowing which songs to play them. When you look after a song – whether it’s your own or one of your writer’s, you kind of think it’s better than it actually is, it’s only when you play it to someone else, do you realise it’s maybe not as good.
I don’t think our songs were good enough at that early stage, and certainly there were lots of barriers for us to get releases in the UK or US. So while that was the ultimate goal, we tried to focus on other markets where we could get more success, such as Japan or Germany. Japan was one of the key success areas for us when we started – we had over 100 top ten singles there. It was amazing that it provided the income that we needed to keep the lights on, and to grow, but while we were having this success, it didn’t feel like success since we couldn’t hear the songs on the radio.
Those successes gave us the luxury of time, to be able to place the right songs in the UK and the US, and our first big single in America was a song called Can’t Be Tamed by Miley Cyrus which was top 10 in the US and top 10 globally. That was the first song that put us on the map.
In 2013 and 2014 we started to have a lot of local hits here in the UK with Little Mix and Olly Murs and Demi Lovato, songs like Move for Little Mix which peaked at number 3. We were starting to enjoy some UK success with our writers. This led to our biggest hit in the company, a song called How Deep Is Your Love by Calvin Harris, it was the first time I ever saw a Phrased Differently song go global in a meaningful way. Prior to that we’d been used to having success locally in certain territories, and now we suddenly had a hit that wherever you travelled in the world, you would hear it. It was basically top 3 in every single market in the world, and it continues to do well – it has just under 850 million streams on Spotify and has sold over 12 million copies world-wide.
We’ve been really fortunate that the writers that we’ve signed from no track record are all coming good, they’ve all got some big releases under their belts, whether it’s Ariana Grande or Jax Jones or Sigala, we’re consistently getting those bigger releases which is remarkable for a company our size.
RM: Thinking about what you said about signing writers earlier than other music publishers do, are there certain things you’re looking for in people?
HB: There’s not a checklist, but there are certain things we look for – musical talent and lyrical talent is a given, because we’re a music company and we try to identify songwriters that are going to have an impact on the scene. For us it’s about finding people that we really like as people. We work so hard to bring good news to good people, and if you drill down a bit deeper, you want people who are persistent, who won’t give up. This industry is an industry where you get rejections 99% of the time, and then you get someone who says ‘yes’ eventually. But you have to live through those rejections, you can’t let it affect your confidence, or your ability to write more songs. I look for people who are resilient, who really believe in themselves and who can take rejection and brush it aside, and continue on the journey. It does take a while to build up enough momentum to start reaching those heights you need to in order to make a living.
RM: It’s great seeing the celebrations on the Phrased Differently Instagram.
HB: We don’t have huge budgets to advertise, so we use our social media platform to create awareness of our writers, especially when they’re doing well. It’s always about them.
RM: How long have you been residents at Rich Mix?
HB: Between 10 and 12 years. We started off in the basement with one room – we needed a studio space, because at that point, we all had little studio set ups at home, and the neighbours were not too impressed. We needed a place where we could play loud music, and obviously being in the basement was perfect, it was already set up as a studio. We took one room, and then each year when we could afford another room, we took another – we added one or two rooms every year, until we had the whole West Basement.
When I joined Rich Mix – none of these buildings opposite existed, it was just waste land, this area has become very prosperous, but at the time we took it, we took it because we could afford them, and they were perfect for what we needed – writing rooms where we could play loud music and be away from the crowd.
RM: Can you talk us through how you designed this new space?
HB: We’ve had our office downstairs for about ten years, and it was getting too small for us as Phrased Differently grew. We’ve been dreaming of moving somewhere where we could have daylight and some more space, and suddenly these rooms became available, and we thought ‘why not?!’. We finally made the move, and I basically wanted a space where it was fun, exciting and vibrant. We take a lot of meetings here with talent that we potentially want to sign, so I wanted them to walk into this room, and have a feeling of the kind of company they were signing to. When we first saw the space it wasn’t there, but I could see what it could become. And I wanted to do a lot of things, but first of all, we had to get rid of the carpet tiles! I wanted to have a warehouse feel with a concrete floor. I go into the Rich Mix reception and I think the floor is so cool, like a resin floor.
We had to hire a team to level the floor and fill it in, then cover with three or four coats of primer paint, and now I’m really pleased with how the floor came up. Then we built this meeting room, because we needed a space where we could have private meetings and take phone calls or have interviews. I wanted to make sure it was a glass office as there’s a lot of light that comes through these windows.
Then, obviously we wanted to make it as Instagrammable as possible. We can’t compete with the larger publishers but writers come in and they want to photograph it, so we chose to overbrand it, basically. We’ve got the #RaisedbyPhrased hashtag which is our company strapline. We wanted to make a show piece out of our discs from all of our different territories, so we built shelving to display them all.
RM: That wall speaks for itself really, doesn’t it!
HB: Then we have an area for coffee and refreshments. And we also built a phone booth, for phone calls, zoom calls, private meetings – with a sliding door. It’s not 100% sound proof but we are adding curtains this week.
It’s a project, it’s still ongoing, but we love it here. First and foremost, we love the daylight, it really changes the mood in the office.
RM: When you come into this new office, does it feel very different now?
HB: When we first decorated and we moved up here, I think for the first three or four months I felt like I was going into the wrong office – like we didn’t deserve this kind of space. But then I realised we do deserve it, we’ve worked our arses off for over a decade, underground. We’re an amazing little success story as something that’s grown organically, in the way the market allowed us to.
We wanted to have a space where our writers would be proud of us, and other writers that we are trying to sign would be impressed.
RM: Do you feel anything differently towards the work you do, after the pandemic?
HB: I got so used to Zoom calls, and it was so easy, and there was no travel time, and it’s easy to forget how to conduct meetings in real life. I love being with people, I love having meetings face to face, especially with writers we’re trying to sign, I think it’s really important to meet in person. And more importantly, the whole team is here, and it’s a different way of working when we’re together.
The pandemic was tough for us, our business relies on writers being together in the same space to create a song. We started to try writing sessions over Zoom – somehow, I felt the songs coming back just didn’t excite me in the same way as real life sessions, and it’s challenging to exchange creative ideas and get your points across and understood on Zoom.
RM: Is there anything you’ve been inspired by this year?
HB: I’ve been inspired by people being back, and working hard, and making amends for the pandemic. What they’ve lost over the pandemic they want to regain. It’s only February but everyone I know in the business is so busy: it feels like the music business is coming back. The pandemic affected us financially and mentally, a lot of people in the industry relied on festivals that were wiped out. I’m inspired by how the music industry has picked itself up and is growing again.
Follow Phrased Differently on Instagram to hear more about their #RaisedbyPhrased writers and their achievements.
Images courtesy of Phrased Differently.
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