I don't actually want people to spend hours using Music Kite.
That might sound like a slightly odd ambition for someone who has spent an unreasonable amount of time building it, but it is probably the simplest way I can explain what I want the thing to do.
I want someone to open it, see what music is happening around them, discover an artist or a venue they didn't know about, and then put their phone back in their pocket and go out.
Go and see the band. Go and see the DJ. Go to the venue. Find the festival. Meet people. Hear something new.
Get out there and actually live.
That is the point.
The slightly ridiculous part is that I arrived at that idea while trying to get back to making music myself.
Coming back to music
I've always gone through cycles with music.
There are periods where I absolutely love it. I write constantly, play, record, produce, perform, disappear down whatever musical rabbit hole has caught me at the time.
Then, for reasons I still don't completely understand, I can turn my back on it for a while. Something else takes over. I throw myself into another project and music drifts into the background.
This latest return came after a pretty rough few years personally. Life had generally become heavier than I would have liked.
Music became a way of dealing with some of that.
Writing was almost therapy. Sometimes simply playing was enough. It gave me somewhere to put thoughts and feelings that were otherwise just bouncing around in my head.
And once I started writing again, I wanted the music to exist somewhere beyond my own room.
I wanted people to be able to hear it.
So I started doing what I have done for years whenever I need something on the internet: I began building.
It started with a website
My first thought was completely straightforward.
I'll build myself a website.
I've been a web designer and developer for a long time, so there was nothing particularly intimidating about that. I could build a WordPress site, pull together the music, connect Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, YouTube and everything else, and create somewhere that represented me properly.
But then I started asking a slightly different question.
What if I couldn't build websites?
What if I was 16 or 17 again, writing loads of songs, trying to get started, and I didn't know how any of this worked?
Where would I go?
There is far more available to musicians now than there was when I was younger. That's a good thing, but it creates another problem: you have to know where to look.
There are platforms for releasing music. Platforms for selling it. Platforms for gigs. Platforms for profiles. Social networks. Ticketing tools. Streaming services. Artist services. Venue services. Promoter services.
You can do almost anything, somewhere.
The problem is that somewhere is usually somewhere different.
At first I thought I might simply turn the site I was building for myself into a reusable theme. Build it once, package it up and let other musicians use the same thing.
That idea lasted about five minutes.
Because once I started looking properly, I realised the website wasn't really the problem.
The whole ecosystem was fragmented.
Down the rabbit hole
An artist doesn't only need somewhere to display their music.
They need places to play. They need to find venues. Venues need to find performers. DJs need opportunities. Promoters need acts. Festivals need artists, suppliers and audiences. People need to know what is happening near them.
And all of those things are connected.
This is where my brain did what it normally does.
I went down one rabbit hole, discovered there was an entire burrow underneath it, and immediately started exploring every tunnel.
Nothing Tim Lord ever does seems to stay small for very long.
The strange thing was that some of this felt familiar.
Nearly 30 years ago I built a website called Newquay Uncovered. I was DJing, running open mic nights and performing gigs, and I wanted to create something for Newquay that connected people with what was happening locally.
It was almost a social network before that language had really settled into everyday use.
The idea was ahead of the technology available to me at the time. I could see what I wanted it to do, but building it properly was another matter.
Coming back to the same kind of problem all these years later, I suddenly realised the technology had caught up.
What I had wanted to build then was now genuinely possible.
Only this time, I didn't want to build it just for Newquay.
The simple problem underneath the enormous project
I still struggle sometimes to put Music Kite into one neat sentence because the platform has grown into lots of interconnected things.
But the original problem is actually very simple.
How do you make it easy for people to discover the music and events around them, and connect the people who make those events happen?
The ambition is simple: somebody looking for something to do can open a map and see the live music, DJ events, venues and festivals nearby.
For an artist, it means being discoverable by listeners, venues and opportunities.
For a venue, it means being able to find artists and performers as well as audiences.
The goal is not to make everybody trawl through Facebook, Instagram, Google and dozens of separate services hoping they happen to find the right thing.
The goal is to make the connections obvious.
That was the core of it.
The vendor side, services, Music Kite Connect and some of the deeper parts of the ecosystem came afterwards. In truth, a lot of those ideas arrived very quickly once I started.
Within the first couple of weeks I could suddenly see how all these pieces might interconnect.
The difficult part wasn't having ideas.
It was getting them out of my head and into a structure that could actually be built.
Building for the thing it might become
I never thought Music Kite was going to be small.
That isn't me pretending I knew exactly what it would become. I didn't. Plenty of the detail has evolved.
But I did know that if the ambition was to create a platform for musicians and the wider live-music ecosystem, I didn't want to build something that worked for 100 people and then spend years rebuilding it every time it grew.
So I approached the foundations as if it might eventually need to serve 100,000 people, 500,000 people, a million people.
Not because I assumed a million people were waiting around the corner.
Because I wanted the architecture to have somewhere to go if they ever were.
If I had started by building a tiny local product and then gradually bolted bits onto it, I suspect I would still be rebuilding the foundations now.
Instead I tried to think: what does this need to look like if it becomes the platform I can already see in my head?
That made the early work slower and harder.
It also meant a lot of the least glamorous work had to happen first.
Data structures. Relationships. Permissions. Infrastructure. The boring bits that nobody sees but everything else depends on.
There was an enormous amount of work in that.
And yes, for a while it completely swallowed the music.
When building the thing replaces doing the thing
There were months where I was basically eating, living, breathing and sleeping Music Kite.
I would go to bed with the laptop next to me, work until my eyes wouldn't stay open, sleep, wake up and start again.
That isn't exaggeration.
There was a period where it felt like I was working on it every available hour of every day.
And of course there is an irony in that.
I had come back to music, started building something partly because I wanted to make sharing and discovering music easier, and then spent so much time building it that I stopped actually making much music myself.
The ideas didn't stop.
I still had songs going around in my head.
I just wasn't sitting down and finishing them.
But I don't think the software became an elaborate way of avoiding music.
For me the two things scratch completely different itches.
Songs and software come from different places
Writing a song is emotional.
It is how I offload things.
Thoughts, feelings, experiences, things I don't quite know how to say directly — I can sometimes put those into a song and suddenly they make sense.
It isn't even necessarily about anybody else hearing it.
I make music for me first.
If somebody else hears it and connects with it, that's fantastic. But the starting point is usually me trying to understand what is happening in my own head.
Building software is almost the opposite.
It is a mental challenge.
I enjoy solving the problem. I enjoy creating something from nothing and making all the pieces work together.
There is creativity in both, obviously, but they don't feel the same to me.
One helps me process what I feel.
The other gives my brain a problem to attack.
And I tend to work in sprints.
I will give something everything I've got, go hard at it until I reach the point I need to reach, and then I can breathe and turn my attention somewhere else for a while.
That is more or less what happened with Music Kite.
I sprinted for months to get the hard foundations into the place I wanted them.
Then I took a breather.
And I made some music again.
Finding room for both is the part I am still working out.
I am no longer interested in launching it just because I can
Originally, I wanted it ready sooner.
But a launch date is not the same as a useful product.
If it takes a little longer to make it genuinely useful, it takes a little longer.
I don't want to launch something for the sake of being able to say it launched.
I want a normal person — not a developer, not somebody who understands what has gone into the machinery underneath it — to open Music Kite and immediately understand why it exists.
They should be able to see the live music, DJ events and festivals around them.
They should be able to click an artist, hear some of their music and find out more.
They should be able to click a venue and see what is happening there.
It should feel obvious.
If it does that, then all the complicated stuff underneath has done its job.
The screen is not the destination
There are enough products fighting for people's attention.
Enough feeds.
Enough scrolling.
Enough software designed around keeping somebody inside it for another five minutes.
I don't want Music Kite to win by making somebody spend more time staring at Music Kite.
I want it to be useful enough that they stop staring at it.
Open it.
Find something.
Go.
If Music Kite eventually helps an artist find a venue, a venue find a performer, somebody discover a band they end up loving, or a group of friends find a gig they would otherwise never have known existed, then it is doing what I built it to do.
There is something quite satisfying about the fact that a project born out of me returning to music has ended up with that purpose.
Music helped pull me back into the world when I needed it.
Maybe the software can help a few other people get out into it too.
