The Journey of SPOKE: Music as Mental Healthcare

Reshaping mental health support through music, culture and community.

This newsletter edition is about the story and journey of building SPOKE, a world-first platform that delivers mental healthcare through music.

Clinical data, academic research, and?mindfulness?drive most mental health tools, and there is no disputing their importance. Still, only some solutions connect with people's cultures and emotional experiences. Music has this power; it can spread positive stories (and clinical tools) and help shape society. Over the past eight years, my experience in this area has shown me, more profoundly than I ever expected, just how powerful music can be for healing and fostering change.

The idea for SPOKE originated from a deeply personal place. Witnessing the decline in mental health among young people and the alarming trend of male suicide, I couldn't help but feel a connection as I have always had anger issues, very likely undiagnosed ADHD and get anxious a lot. This issue hit close to home again, as the male suicide statistics tragically included my brother's close friend, who passed away at just fifteen, as well as two brothers of my friends in the years after.

During this time, my brother and his friends refused school counselling and therapy, and I became acutely aware of how much the tools I had access to (therapy, mindfulness, etc) were a cultural stretch for them. By 'cultural stretch ', I mean that these tools did not resonate with their cultural backgrounds, experiences, or interests, so they didn’t access them.

Something doesn't add up.

I became obsessed with understanding why general mental health issues (across all people) are getting worse despite the numerous mental health solutions available. There are literally thousands of mental health apps and services. Something didn't seem to add up.

So, while running my previous company, we started organising events that combined music, such as rap and hip-hop, with meditation and mindfulness to make these practices relevant. We were invited to perform in some schools and had a great reception. This is where the ideas started sparking.

Mental health solutions often have a similar appearance, tone, and feel, either leaning towards a yogic or clinical approach. Unfortunately, these options are not particularly culturally relevant, especially for young men and those from underrepresented backgrounds. So, how about we just flip it and create a solution entrenched in cultural relevance but informed by science? I began researching this potential and conducted numerous focus groups and surveys to understand what our target audience responds well to.

The research continued and led me to focus on Social Innovation (the study of solving global systemic social problems) at Cambridge University. There, I deepened some of my research around young male mental health and then the role of artists in society. Music?kept coming up?as the primary way young people—especially those from underrepresented groups—manage their emotions.

Music is the bridge

The fact is, people have always turned to music to solve emotional tension, such as anxiety, poor sleep, heartbreak, etc. Some top search terms in music apps and streaming platforms are things like 'music for anxiety', 'podcast to heal from heartbreak', etc. So, people are already searching for mental and emotional health cures in music. However, a gaping hole is that the industry did not create music and culture platforms with impact or mental health in mind. In fact, at times, the opposite. The metrics for their success are streams, charts, record sales, etc, which leads to creating with a view of reaching success in those metrics.

One big issue is that our society has no way of meaningfully empowering artists and the music industry as a catalyst to help solve the mental health crisis. The music industry is so heavily capitalised that artists are now desperately trying to sell products to make a living. Despite being the 'world's natural healers,' most artists cannot think about impact because they are too anxious about how to get by financially. This catch-22 is effectively a downhill spiral.

We did not create SPOKE because of the music industry's complex failures in this area, but we recognised them as contributing factors to the overall problem that needs solving. We recognised the need for a new mental health support approach that attracted artists and offered a healthy model for artist work.

This being said, SPOKE also became a model for a new way of creating and distributing music, with the listener's impact as the north star. Needless to say, this goal has not yet been actualised, but it is very much a part of our vision.

SPOKE's early days

SPOKE began as a Covid-era, born-in-captivity, VC-backed tech startup. This means we'd accepted investor money (only from some of the world's best Impact funds, I'll add) to scale fast. The idea for SPOKE was simple: let's bake proven mental healthcare (such as CBT, mindfulness, positive psychology, etc.) into music and lyrics while working with amazing up-and-coming artists with substantial cultural leverage.?This way, we can make mental healthcare relevant to more people.

After raising our initial pre-seed in 2022, we started to build.

I remember sitting in the studio, our office at the time, with founding team member Alex Lemom—also known as?Lemzi—and the talented producer?Miles. We were?trying to determine the exact sound of SPOKE, the emotional journey we wanted the tracks to convey, and how to incorporate mental health exercises into the lyrics and flow.

We wanted to take people on a sound journey unlike any other. It was exhilarating bringing our vision to life, and it felt like we had a mission to fulfil. Once we released the first iterations of the app, we began to receive reviews and feedback. Our downloads started to spike, and the reviews on the App Store reflect this positive response.

Users commented, "This app has helped me so much and excited me to meditate and practice mindfulness," and "This is the mindfulness tool I never knew I needed! I am so grateful it was introduced to me. I love how CBT and ACT are seamlessly integrated into the experience. Our world needs this!"

Some of the more intimate and personal reviews made me cry — people who felt suicidal, and I'll never forget a review that shared having long COVID and listening to SPOKE helped them heal. To impact people's lives in such a powerful way leaves a feeling words cannot describe.?

We began receiving press coverage and winning awards, and that trend has continued. Earlier this year, we won the SXSW Innovation Award in Austin, which was indeed a "pinch me" moment.

However, among the Insta-LinkedIn highlights and stream of good news, there has been a lot of turbulence over the past year. We have not grown as we hoped, and this left us unable to raise more investment (to grow). Going back, I’d double down more on our commercialisation, but I also know the amount of creative headspace that went into building something truly innovative.

That said, we still have over 35,000 downloads, thousands of people using the app each month, and hundreds of people paying for the service. Even though these numbers are not massive, we are exceptionally proud of the fact that our audience is not your typical "wellness" audience—incredibly diverse, young, and gender-balanced. Hardly any mental health products have come close to attracting and retaining our audience.

One of the best memories is when we used to run regular SPOKEx “live mindful gig” events at our office in Shoreditch, where we shared beautiful moments of connection and inspiration. (see header photo!)

So what now

Our strategy has sharply focused on distribution, growth, and community building. This is a fundamental part of our impact and mission, and we will double down on this. Between the original founding team, we need to bring in some extra skills to power up the growth and community, so I am actively?looking for a new co-founder with this as their MO.

We will also raise a runway to move into a strategy to solve this global crisis as a matter of urgency, and we believe a part of this is getting SPOKE into the hands of more people. Alongside this raise, we will bring our new elite founder and perhaps one or two more new, world-leading stakeholders. For speed and due to the significantly lower valuation for this raise, we will only accept funds from people who have aligned values and can help in our mission. We will be closing this round in January. If you want to join, email me now ([email protected]).

Last but not least

A lot more happened between the top-line explanation of the SPOKE journey above. I regularly give talks and workshops on entrepreneurship and love to share the learnings we have made in product, people, fundraising, and being a female entrepreneur who does not fit the mainstream culture and/or persona of the tech industry. I am always happy to share these learnings; just reach out.

We live in a really intense time, and the world and our societies will probably get worse before they get better. So much has happened over these four years to shape society's hearts and minds, and the world is changing rapidly. Old norms and systems are being exposed and studied, and new ones are being created by people who understand our desperate need for new systems to live by.

Young people clearly see that our world leaders care more about profits and greed than humanity. The genocide in Gaza has changed everything; it has pulled the veil off of the eyes of millions of people in the West like nothing else in history. Now, see how young people also understand more about the horrors in The Congo (fuelled by the West’s greed for tech) and Sudan (objectively the worst humanitarian crisis on earth).

I will never get over recently receiving a direct message from one of our SPOKE community, aged just 12 or 13, saying, “I cannot cope with what I am seeing. I thought we lived in a world that cares about people”.

The road toward collective freedom and liberation for all is the only route that will help solve the mental health crisis, too. It is all interconnected.

Solving the mental health crisis will also require solving some of our society's profoundly systemic problems. Therefore, aligned people have to unite to create a network effect of change toward a better and more equitable world.

Music, as the heart of culture, emotion, and storytelling, has a unique ability to help shape a new future. It can inspire imagination, which is what we?desperately?need?to envision a new world.

This being said, the next edition will review us, the postmodern human, our decline in spirituality, our loss of connection with the animate world, the ways music has played the role of connection between us and spirituality, and what we can do to reignite this connection. I have been learning from incredible minds in this space and look forward to introducing you to their work.

See you next time!

Oh, and remember - we are the sound.

Disclaimer: please excuse slight errors. I write these newsletters in between other responsibilities, so with limited time comes limited copy-checking. Thank you for reading!