Strategic conversations with the people actually disrupting how IP is built in entertainment, media, and the creator economy. One person. One conversation. One question: where does IP value actually start, who builds it, and who ends up owning it?

On the last day of May, Mis-Teeq walked out on the Britain’s Got Talent final for their first performance in 22 years, and something happened that went beyond nostalgia. Within twenty-four hours the clip had 240,000 views. By June, Wembley Arena was confirmed. The garage-pop and early UK R&B sounds that defined a generation of British music are generating more commercial value right now than they have in two decades – streaming numbers for that era are climbing, licensing inquiries are up, and reunion tours are selling out.

But embedded in that moment is a question the industry is not asking openly enough: when those catalogues come back to life, who actually owns the value? Not who performs it – who owns it?

The answer, almost always, is not the people who built it.

Jake Gosling can answer it specifically.

THE ROOM WHERE IT STARTS

Sticky Studios sits in a converted barn in an apple orchard in Windlesham, Surrey. Not a major label facility, not a city studio with a client list on the wall and a reception desk – a barn, in an orchard, in a village. And this is where Ed Sheeran’s career began.

In 2007, a publisher dispatched a 16-year-old to Sticky Studios for a writing session. Jake remembers it clearly.

“He’d just moved to London and he was living above a pub. We sat down, and we were talking about him moving to London – and that became ’The City’, which was the first thing we wrote together.”

That conversation became a song. The song became a collaboration. The collaboration became one of the most commercially significant careers in British music history. Jake Gosling was in the room when it started. He is the reason the room existed.

FINDING THE LANE

Before Ed, Jake had built his reputation in UK urban music – producing Wiley, Kano and Wretch 32, remixing for Lady Gaga and Timbaland. He brought something from that background that the mainstream pop industry has always struggled with: the understanding that cultural specificity is commercial strength, not a limitation. That the producer’s job is not to replicate what is already working, but to find what is genuinely there.

I first put that argument to Jake on a panel I curated at SXSW London in 2025. This series – launching a year on – is what grew from that conversation.

“The main thing is that you have to find your own lane,” he said. “A lot of major record labels, people tend to jump on the bandwagon – that works, so let’s just copy it again and again. As an artist, producer, or songwriter, you have got to find a way to create something unique. And that is very difficult to do.”

With Ed, the lane was genuinely hard to read. His sound was a hybrid of storytelling influences and hip-hop sensibility – he had looped his own beats, knew his samples, understood rhythm from the ground up. When the labels heard it, most of them did not know what to make of it. “I remember a time when a lot of labels were going, wow, what is this?” Jake said. The community understood it before the industry did. The late Jamal Edwards put Ed’s early music online through SBTV, and it found its audience without the machine. That is what happens when IP is built from the culture outward rather than from a commissioning brief downward.

Jake applies this as a deliberate method with every artist who comes through the studio now.

“A lot of artists come to me and I have a kind of checklist thing,” he said. “What are you passionate about? Have you got something to say? Is this international? Is it localised? Is it the UK? I go through it from my experience, highlight those elements, and work with the artists to bring it out of them.”

That is not a music production process. That is IP architecture – identifying what is genuinely distinctive about an artist’s identity before a single commercial decision gets made. The value is already there. The producer’s job is to find it, name it, and build around it.

THE BRAND THAT CAME TO THE SONG

Early in the collaboration, Jake made a decision that most producers do not think to make. He absorbed production costs well beyond the £1,000 per EP Ed was contributing to cover recording basics, because he believed in what they were making. He shared the creative risk. In return, he retained ownership stakes in the work. That decision created the conditions for everything that followed.

The Legoland story is a good illustration. After “Lego House” charted from Ed’s 2011 debut album, recorded at Sticky Studios, Legoland got in touch with Jake at the studio. Their interest came directly from the connection between the song, Ed’s genuine enthusiasm for Lego, and the creative work being made at the time. Jake passed the enquiry on to Ed’s management team, who handled the discussions from there. The important point was that the opportunity originated from the music itself. The song created the connection. The brand followed the art.

Around the same time, representatives from Red Bull became aware of the work happening at Sticky Studios and got in touch. Knowing that Jake was working with Ed Sheeran and a number of emerging artists, they reached out and stopped by the studio while Ed was recording. From that point on, Red Bull became a familiar presence around the studio, supporting sessions and artists who passed through its doors. Again, the significance was not the commercial relationship itself, but the fact that the interest was generated by the creative activity taking place in the room.

Both stories reveal the same thing: the studio is the ecosystem, and the producer is the access point. The commercial value does not start when the major label gets involved – it starts in the room where the work is made.

“It’s really important – it’s not just about doing a deal,” Jake told me. “It’s about that harmony between what the brand represents and what the artist’s demographic is.”

When that harmony is real, the brand relationship extends the IP. When it is not – when an artist takes a deal purely for the paycheque – the audience sees through it. The credibility erodes. The short-term revenue costs long-term value.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REACH AND DEPTH

“I learned all about propaganda,” he said at the panel, “and about how whatever you’re seeing or watching – it’s always been trying to influence you. From wartime cinema footage edited to make people feel they needed to go and fight, to everything we consume now. For an artist to understand that, and not get too bogged down by it, is really important.”

Jake studied media at university in Salford, and has been thinking about how influence works since before he walked into a studio. That analytical foundation shapes everything he does. He understands the machinery of attention – how labels put money behind music to force exposure, how algorithms surface content to people who will scroll past it, how a platform can hand an artist a million followers who have never actually heard the work. “Even artists that loads of people wouldn’t know of have got millions of followers who have never heard their music,” he said. “It’s a different world.”

What he is describing is the gap between reach and depth – between an audience that can be bought and one that has been built. The former is a metric. The latter is an IP asset. “They’ve just become smarter with the IP,” he said of musicians navigating the creator economy. “They’re just building commercial streams that make sense.” But smarter with IP and genuinely building something durable are not the same thing, and Jake has been doing this long enough to know the difference.

There is a moment in the prep call before the panel where Jake is asked how he genuinely feels about his own participation in brand content – he does occasional work with a health brand, filming artists’ reactions to a ginger shot challenge. He pauses. “It gives me a bit of a headache, to be honest.” It is the most honest thing he says in the conversation, and more credible than any clean position on brand philosophy. He is not immune to the pressures he describes. He is navigating them like everyone else, with more critical awareness than most, and no illusions about what they cost.

THE HUMAN THING

The most revealing moment in the SXSW panel had nothing to do with brands or streaming or IP architecture. It came when Jake described what happens when a song connects with someone in a way that has nothing to do with the music industry at all.

“When you write a song and something resonates,” he said, “before you know it, it’s a worldwide hit. You get an email saying this is my wedding song, or I fell in love to this song.”

Then he said the other thing.

“But you get the flip side – someone says that’s the song they played at a funeral.”

He paused on it.

“It is an incredible thing. And I think with AI coming in and all these things happening, it is a really important time to be human. Embrace the tools – don’t run away from them. But use them in a human way. Think of the great records: the guitar slightly out, the vocals not perfectly tuned. There is something really nice about a bit of rock and roll.”

This is what the creator economy keeps trying to systematise and cannot: the moment when a piece of creative work reaches someone in a way they did not anticipate and changes how they feel about their own life. You cannot engineer it. You can only create the conditions where it might happen – and Jake’s view, from more than twenty years of being in those rooms, is that it demands presence. Not a remote session, not a call. The actual room, with the actual people, in the actual moment.

WHO BUILDS IT. WHO ENDS UP OWNING IT.

The question that runs through every conversation in this series is the one the nostalgia boom makes newly urgent: where does IP value actually start, who builds it, and who ends up owning it?

The 90s and early 2000s revival answer is uncomfortable. The value in those catalogues was built in rooms like Sticky Studios – by producers, A&R people, co-writers and creative directors who understood the audience before the audience understood itself. But the value is being captured right now by whoever holds the rights: often a major label, sometimes a private equity firm that acquired the catalogue for investment purposes, and rarely the people who were in the room when it was made.

Jake Gosling’s story with Ed Sheeran is a structural exception to that pattern – and the public record makes it specific. Jake co-wrote seven of the eleven tracks on “+”. In 2013, he set up his own publishing company, The Movement London Limited, specifically to hold and administer his own rights rather than ceding them to a major publisher. His historic Ed Sheeran catalogue sits there. When “Thinking Out Loud” became the first song to spend a full year in the UK top 40 and the first to reach 500 million streams on Spotify, Jake was receiving royalties from every one of those plays. He still is. He has since founded his own record label and management company. He did not just build the IP. He built the architecture around it to make sure it stayed his.

At Engine Pop™ we call this the Squeeze and the Orchard. A squeeze extracts value from a moment – one campaign, one post, one commission. An orchard plants something that grows across seasons, platforms and markets. The nostalgia wave washing through British music right now is full of orchards other people planted. The question for anyone building IP today is whether they are designing architecture that lets them stay in the picture when the value matures, or whether they are building something they will one day watch someone else harvest.

On 3 January 2025, Jake received his tenth UK Number 1 plaque – for Ed Sheeran’s ÷+× (Tour Collection), a compilation drawn from the five albums they built together across fifteen years. The orchard, still yielding. Earlier that same month, he launched Hotel Records, a new independent label where he is currently developing a fresh roster of artists from scratch. He is not sitting on what he built. He is still building.

The value starts in the room. It always has.

The studio is called Sticky Studios. It sits in a converted barn inside an apple orchard in Surrey. Jake has been planting things there since 2007. The metaphor was never a metaphor.

This is the second in The Disruptors, an Engine Room series of strategic conversations with the people actually building IP in entertainment, media, and the creator economy.

Athena Witter is the founder of Engine Pop™, a creative and commercial IP strategy studio working with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world.

Connect: LinkedIn | hello@enginepop.co | enginepop.co

Welcome to Engine Room. I'm Athena. I spent 25 years building IP inside entertainment - BBC Studios, Fremantle, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, MTV. Now I run Engine Pop™ and I write this newsletter. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here.

This week, SXSW London returned to Shoreditch. It felt like the right moment to finally launch this.

A year ago I moderated a panel at SXSW London that I’d conceived and curated called “Community and Influence: The Disruptors.” Jake Gosling (Ed Sheeran’s producer), Luke Hyams (The Sidemen Story, Netflix), Nadu Placca Rodriguez (The Zoo XYZ). We talked about how creators and cultural leaders are reshaping influence through community, not reach. It was the first time I’d publicly said the words “Engine Pop” on a stage.

But it wasn’t the first time I’d said them out loud.

The evening before I left BBC Studios, I’d been invited to speak at Provoke - an intimate, invite-only event at Territory Studio designed to challenge the way a room thinks. I sat on a panel about brand fandom alongside Christopher Kenna, Katie Greenyer and others. I talked about Doctor Who and Bluey and fan communities. I was representing BBC Studios for the last time.

Then I told the room I was leaving.

My last act inside the corporation was also my first act outside it.

So what is The Disruptors?

Strategic conversations with the people who are actually disrupting how IP is built in entertainment, media, and the creator economy. Not commenting on it. Not theorising. Doing it.

One person per piece. One conversation. One question the industry talks around but rarely confronts: where does IP value actually start, who builds it, and who ends up owning it?

The first season gets into how a music producer builds commercial value long before a deal gets signed. How a curator’s taste can transform the identity of an entire label. How a community the industry would overlook can generate more durable revenue than one with millions of followers. How the infrastructure that enables creators to build at scale is being designed from scratch by the people the old system left behind. And how the deal architecture around talent-led IP is being rewritten by agencies that realised the old model doesn’t work anymore.

If you work in entertainment, media, or the creator economy - or you’re building something in that space - this is for you.

The pattern that made me leave

The same thing kept happening, wherever I went.

I’d be inside a franchise that millions of people loved, working with teams who were brilliant at making content, and I’d watch the value get built by one group of people and captured by another. The producer who understood the audience. The developer who saw the format first. The digital team who turned a TV show into a community. They’d do the work. The deal structures would reward someone else.

At BBC Studios I was VP of Digital Content and Programming. Doctor Who, Bluey, and everything in between. What I learned: content is what you make. IP is what you own. Doctor Who has been generating value for sixty years because the architecture underneath it was designed to build. When it’s not designed well, the value leaks out and nobody notices until it’s gone.

At ITV I commissioned digital content and built second-screen experiences for X Factor, BGT, I’m A Celebrity, Love Island. I learned that audiences aren’t passive - they’re productive. The memes, the commentary, the communities fans build around a show - that’s an asset. But the industry had no way to price it. We were sitting on value we couldn’t see.

At Fremantle I moved to the other side - running digital operations for BGT, X Factor, Too Hot To Handle. The same shows I’d commissioned content for at ITV, now seen from the production chair. Having sat in both chairs on the same franchises taught me how much value gets created in the space between them and how little of it is deliberately designed.

At Channel 4’s Box Plus Network I ran editorial and production across five divisions in a music-first environment. Running every dimension of a niche vertical showed me how IP grows across touchpoints when you control the whole ecosystem. Music taught me that the best commercial IP is built from culture outward, not from a commissioning brief downward.

Same pattern everywhere. The people who build the value aren’t the people who capture it.

The Squeeze and the Orchard

I left corporate life because the gap I kept seeing wasn’t going to close from the inside.

The entertainment industry is extraordinarily good at making content. It’s become less good at asking whether what it’s making has any commercial life beyond the first window. The question that turns a production company into an IP company, a creator into a studio, a format into a franchise - it’s not “will this perform?” It’s “will this last?”

Engine Pop™ exists to sit in that gap. We work with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world. Ideally before the significant decisions get made. Sometimes after. Always with the same question: is this built to last?

I use a framework I call the Squeeze and the Orchard. Most media businesses are running a squeeze - extracting value from a moment, optimising for the feed, the algorithm, the current commission. One use. Then it’s gone. An orchard is different. You plant formats, characters, worlds, relationships - IP that delivers across seasons, platforms, markets, and generations. The businesses that will still be standing in five years are the ones making orchard decisions now.

The question

Are you squeezing, or are you planting?

Are you extracting value from a moment, or building something that will still be growing when the moment has passed? Are you chasing the algorithm, or designing IP that survives the next platform change? Are you making content, or are you building architecture?

The disruptors I’ve spoken to have all chosen planting. They’re playing a longer game, in a quieter way. And they’re the ones who will still be here in ten years.

This series is for anyone who wants to understand how they did it.

It started at Provoke - my last night inside the machine, my first night outside it. It went to the main stage at SXSW London. And now, a year later, it becomes The Disruptors.

First interview drops next week. Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

Athena Witter is the founder of Engine Pop™, a creative and commercial content growth studio working with producers, founders and organisations building IP in a digital-first world.

hello@enginepop.co | enginepop.co