Industry Standard. Reception, Response, and What Comes Next

When I first put Industry Standard out into the world, I didn’t really know how it would be received.

This was never a conventional advocacy project. No clear call to action. No visuals. No campaign framing. Just sound. Built from recordings gathered during undercover investigations, shaped into something people could sit with and listen to.

Over the past few weeks, the response has been striking.

Not just from within the animal protection world, but from music, arts, and cultural spaces too. The project seems to be moving across boundaries in a way I hadn’t fully anticipated.

I’ve taken the album out through a series of listening events and talks. A packed evening at Truck Record Store in Oxford, a session at Rockaway Park near Bristol, and a listening event at the Art Centre Club in Bucharest, Romania, alongside smaller, more intimate sessions in people’s homes.

There’s something that happens in those rooms that feels important.

A room full of people listening together is very different from how we usually engage with content. No scrolling. No distraction. Just attention. The sound unfolds slowly, and people sit with it. The conversations that follow are more reflective, less reactive.

That has been consistent across each event.

The project has also started to take shape in ways I didn’t expect. Invitations from arts venues to develop installations. Conversations with artists and filmmakers who want to respond to the work. People creating their own interpretations. Podcasts and discussions that are opening it up to new audiences.

In a short space of time, what began as a side project has started to develop its own trajectory. The record is now also being distributed through an independent label, helping it reach further into music spaces beyond the usual advocacy channels.

What’s become clear is that there is an appetite for something different.

For a long time, investigations have relied on visual evidence. And rightly so. Images have driven change and exposed what industries try to keep hidden. That work continues and remains essential.

But there is also space to explore other ways of bearing witness.

Work that doesn’t instruct or preach, but creates space. That allows people to engage on their own terms. To listen, reflect, and join the dots themselves.

This sits alongside my investigation work, not instead of it. We’ve just wrapped a four-month project in Eastern Europe, we’re currently mid-way through an investigation in Latin America, and more are planned in Africa and Europe over the coming months.

But Industry Standard has opened up another route.

One that reaches different audiences. One that operates through culture as much as evidence.

There’s clearly something here worth exploring further.

I’m keen to keep developing the listening events, and to work with artists, venues and organisations who are interested in pushing this format. Installations, collaborations, new ways of presenting the material.

For now, I’m still taking it in.

It’s rare to put something out that feels this open-ended, and rarer still to see it take on a life of its own so quickly.

More to come.