The Kanye Moment

“We the rock stars, and I’m the biggest of all of them.”

So said Kanye West in a 2013 interview on BBC Radio 1.

A decade later, that statement feels less true for Kanye - but for the man on the other side of the interview table, Zane Lowe, it’s a different story entirely.

Once just the biggest DJ on Radio 1, he’s now arguably the most influential DJ in the world. And this was the conversation that put him there.

The interview began as a relatively standard affair, staying on track for the first eight minutes. Then it went off the rails.

Fashion, politics, God - Kanye started talking and didn’t stop. For an hour. When he finally left, Lowe and his team were stunned.

The day after, they had to figure out what to do with it. Lowe initially wanted to pull the interview - this wasn’t radio; it was chaos. A DJ’s job was to find new music, not nod along to over an hour of stream-of-consciousness musings.

His producer, however, disagreed and managed to convince him to let it air. It went viral, became a career-defining hit, and reshaped what audiences expect from music broadcasting.

“Looking back,” Lowe admitted, “I nearly didn’t execute on something that changed my life.”

At the time, Lowe didn’t realize the broader forces already at work. Streaming was upending the music industry, and his role as a tastemaker was fading. What his audience wanted wasn’t just new music - it was the stories behind what they were already listening to.

Two years later, Lowe left Radio 1 to become Global Creative Director at Apple Music and the go-to confidante for music royalty. From Harry Styles to Taylor Swift to Paul McCartney, when musicians want to bare it all, there’s only one name in town.

He’s still a radio DJ, just as he was when he joined Radio 1 in 2003. But the job has transformed.

Back then, being a DJ meant receiving new records, finding the best ones, playing them pre-release for a few weeks, and helping make them hits. By the time of the Kanye interview, however, that model had been holed below the waterline.

As Lowe puts it:

“If fans can talk directly to artists on social media and listen to songs on streaming sites, where does that leave me? I can’t control the environment any more; you no longer have to come to my radio show to hear the song.”

His answer was to ditch the role of tastemaker entirely. Rather than finding new music, he shifted to providing context for the artists and their work.

Less John Peel. More Howard Stern.

In truth, more of us are like Lowe in 2013 than we realize: doing work that reflects what our job was, not what it should be. And at some point we’ll all face our own Kanye moment: a chance to adapt and rethink how we work for the better.

The real question is whether we’ll recognize it when it comes - or, like Lowe, have someone around us who does.

Because more of us miss our Kanye moments than hit them. We pull the interview. And, to be fair, it’s easy to see why.

Growing up as a teenager in 00s Britain, Radio 1 and its slate of DJs were such a huge cultural force that it’s hard not to miss the era of linear broadcasting. The DJs who thrive today are the battle-hardened survivors of that transition.

Even for them, it’s a different world now: no longer able to rely on millions of passive listeners, they cater to smaller, more engaged audiences.

Lowe’s interviews are iconic, but even his most popular - an interview with Harry Styles in 2019 - has yet to crack 10 million views on YouTube. For comparison, Mr Beast’s latest video hit 120 million views in five days.

The market still exists, but it’s much smaller than it was when Lowe joined the BBC in 2003.

But what’s the alternative? It’s surely better to survive than die nobly.

Creativity is, at its heart, pragmatism, and look at the results: whether it’s this year’s Grammy nominees for best album, Spotify’s latest user numbers - or simply the moment Lowe gets Fred Again to synthesise live for 60 seconds mid-interview - and it’s hard to call the music industry an industry on its knees.

Plus if you get it right, the rewards can come faster than you think. Lowe himself has described what happened after the Kanye interview:

“From there, it was Jay Z, Eminem, Rick Rubin - all within six months. That really set me on this pathway to everything that’s happening now.”

What’s at stake for us is clear when you watch Zane Lowe in action today.

Watching any of his interviews makes clear within seconds that he loves what he’s doing - creativity on his terms. Had he fumbled his Kanye moment, it’s unlikely he’d still have the chance to work in such an authentically creative way.

That’s the brutal truth: the choice we face isn’t just whether to adapt or not—it’s whether we’re ready to execute when the moment comes. Lowe didn’t think from first principles about how the industry was changing. He just tried something new. And in doing so, he uncovered something transformative.

Sometimes, you can see an industry changing in real time. Sometimes, the shift is invisible until it’s too late. But in those rare moments of opportunity, everything can change.

Because - one last Lowe quote to finish: “The most important part of creativity is actually executing.”

aled@ashore.io

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Once a week, I write about living creatively in an uncreative world - drawing lessons from unlikely spaces, pop culture, and tradition to help us adapt thoughtfully to change.

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