Ben Harris-Hayes has done pretty much everything a musician can do. Bands, touring, session work, record labels, composing for film, TV, and, for the past few years, a full-time role composing and designing sound for games. He didn’t plan it that way. He just kept going, kept saying yes to whatever was in front of him, and figured it out as he went.
There was a day job at the NHS running alongside the music for years. There were platforms and job boards that promised work and delivered very little. And there was the networking — meeting people, leaving an impression, and then getting a call two months later out of nowhere. That, more than anything, is how the work actually came in.
“I still firmly believe in networking… meeting someone and then two months later they call you up out of the blue.”
There was also the job that got away. Ben was down to the final two for a major games role in Canada. Demos, calls, the whole process. He felt good about it. The only way it could go wrong, he told himself, was if the other candidate had shipped a major studio title. The other candidate had shipped a major studio title. It crushed him. Not because he’d done anything wrong, but because there was nothing he could have done differently.
Losing out like that is something a lot of people in creative industries will recognise. You do everything right and still lose out to a credit you haven’t had the chance to earn yet. Ben talks about it honestly, without bitterness, and moves on. Which is probably part of why he’s still here.
The conversation covers a lot of ground. AI takes up a significant chunk of it. Ben isn’t scared of it. He has concerns, particularly around data scraping and what it means for the musicians whose work has been absorbed into these models without consent. The EU AI Act, content ID, transparency, music theft from personal experience, it’s a wide-ranging and at times funny conversation about an industry that keeps shifting the ground beneath the people working in it.
But the moment that stays with you comes right at the end. After everything — the technology, the freelance grind, the near-misses, the years of doing whatever it took — Ben talks about getting back to playing live. Three bands covering everything from heavy metal to dance to acoustic.
He’s coming full circle, back to being in a room with people, back to the thing that started all of it.
“I need that human interaction,” he says. “And that’s why, I think, AI will still lose out in the end.”
Hard to argue with that.
Watch or listen to all episodes via the Media Music Now Conversations page
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