Exploring Life & Business with Daniel Hodson of SickSet Media Ltd

Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Hodson.

Hi Daniel, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Before SickSet Media existed, Dan was in a band.

Like most people who spend their college years on stages and in van seats, it wasn’t really about the music alone. It was about the community. Rock and metal don’t just attract fans, they build families. Promoters, photographers, label reps, other bands on the bill, the people who show up early and stay till the last song. You get pulled into a world that doesn’t let go easily.

So when Dan’s band eventually called it a day, the music stopped, but the pull toward that community didn’t. He wasn’t ready to leave it behind, and it turned out he didn’t have to.

Alongside the band, Dan had spent over a decade working in digital marketing, across entertainment, non-profit, environmental, and engineering sectors. It gave him a broad, sharp skillset that most working musicians simply don’t have time to build. Within the scene, that stood out. Bands started coming to him directly, informally, just asking “Dan” for help getting their music in front of the right people.

What started as a favour for friends turned into a pattern. And the pattern turned into a business.

In 2023, a year after his band ended, Dan launched SickSet Media, built to formalise the help he’d already been giving and take it to a wider roster of artists.

The music industry is more crowded than it’s ever been, and that’s created an opening for a lot of bad actors. Scroll through enough artist forums or Instagram DMs and you’ll find dozens of services promising fast growth, viral playlists, or “guaranteed” exposure for next to nothing.

Dan had seen it from both sides, as a musician being pitched these services and as a marketer who understood exactly why they don’t work. There are no shortcuts in an industry this competitive. Bots and fake engagement don’t build fans, they build numbers that mean nothing to a label, a booking agent, or a real listener.

That gap, between what artists were being sold and what actually moves the needle, is what SickSet Media was built to close. Not with hacks, but with the same ethical, strategic marketing practices used across other serious industries, applied properly to rock and metal.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Absolutely not. The music industry is close-knit, and breaking in as the new agency on the block is a very difficult task. The vast majority of established agencies have been around for decades, are trusted, and have a strong client base. But, despite all odds, we are thriving, which is a testiment to the work we do at our core.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about SickSet Media Ltd?
SickSet Media is a marketing and PR agency built specifically for rock and metal artists. We’re a small team of four, all genuine fans of the genre, who’ve spent years leading high profile promotional campaigns, running labels, and managing artists before turning that experience into an agency of our own. We’ve worked with everyone from Ice Nine Kills, Pierce The Veil and The Pretty Reckless down to bands just releasing their first EP, so the range is genuinely wide.

What we specialise in is the full promotional stack for a band: PR, Spotify marketing, and YouTube advertising, all built around one idea, which is that growth only means something if it’s real. Our PR campaigns go out to a manually curated list of nearly 1,000 rock, metal, and alternative outlets and average close to a 50% open rate. Our Meta and Spotify campaigns are built to filter out bots and low quality traffic so the streams and saves we generate actually convert into fans who come back, not numbers that look good for a week and disappear. We’ve used that approach to help bands land coverage in Kerrang! and Metal Hammer, break into festivals like Bloodstock and Arctangent, sell out venues, and in a couple of cases, land management and label deals off the back of the momentum we built for them.

What sets us apart is that we’re not marketers who got into music, we’re music people who happen to be very good at marketing. Every one of us came up through the scene, playing in bands, running labels, or working the promo side of the industry, so we’re not guessing at what resonates with rock and metal fans. That’s rare in an industry that’s currently flooded with cheap, bot-driven “growth” services promising fast results for next to nothing. We built SickSet specifically as the opposite of that. No shortcuts, no inflated numbers, just honest, strategic marketing that treats artists like a long term investment instead of a quick invoice.

What we’re proudest of, brand wise, is probably the line that’s on everything we put out: “We generate fans, not just numbers.” It’s not a slogan we picked because it sounded good, it’s genuinely the standard we hold every campaign to, and it’s the reason bands keep coming back to us for release after release.

If there’s one thing I’d want readers to take away, it’s that we built this agency to be the most transparent option in the space. You’ll always know exactly what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how it’s performing, because that’s the kind of agency we wished existed when we were the ones in the band trying to figure all this out ourselves.

What were you like growing up?
I grew up listening to Slipknot, Lamb of God, Trivium, Machine Head and loads more. These are the bands that encouraged me to explore the genres of rock and metal, and what influenced me to pick up drumming when I was 13.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sicksetmedia.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sicksetmedia/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sicksetmedia/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sicksetmedia/