Youtube have just launched their original "Together we Rise" - a documentary on our story at GRM Daily. How we built the biggest platform both website and Youtube for UK music and culture.
I was honoured to provide a key pillar of the story, how we built the digital platform and of course the trials and tribulations of our story, including how we lost our youtube channel completely.
It’s been over 10 years since I first got a message from aspiring rapper Posty, asking me to call him about an idea for a new grime blog, “World Star Grime.” At the time, Posty and I had been chatting about various projects, including his mixtapes and the MySpace design he needed, which he said had to be “sick like J2K’s.”
Back then, I was fully immersed in the grime scene. If I wasn’t listening to it or talking about it on forums, I was pitching artists for mixtape covers and helping them build their MySpace pages.
My love for the music started when I first heard garage hits from Heartless Crew, So Solid Crew, and Oxide & Neutrino on one of SKY’s music channels.
The moment I heard Dizzee Rascal's "I Luv U," I was hooked.
From then on, I spent hours on LimeWire hunting down sets, freestyles, and tracks from artists I barely knew, risking computer viruses daily. But I didn’t care—it was worth it.
When MySpace came along, it became the perfect outlet for my graphic and web design skills. Around 2006-2009, the UK grime scene was visually underrepresented.
Unless an artist was signed to a major label, most of the content looked unpolished and amateur. It really was an underground movement, which excited me even more.
I wanted to help elevate the artists I admired by creating something that represented them better. Winning J2K’s album artwork competition was the turning point for me.
It gave me the exposure to work with other artists, designing MySpace pages and mixtape covers for acts like N-Dubz and Roll Deep.
That’s how I made my name. So when Posty came to me with the idea for creating the "World Star Grime" of the UK, I thought, "Why not?" I wasn’t a big fan of the blog formats at the time—chronological posts and endless forum threads were just hard to consume.
I saw a gap and figured this could work, even though I didn’t have huge expectations. Honestly, I was just happy to scratch my own itch.
With the small budget Posty and Pierre scraped together—around £1,000—I got to work. Most of that money went to getting some technical help because, as soon as I started, my ideas for the UX spiraled out of control.
I had grand plans for video ratings and view counters, features that stretched my coding abilities. So, while I focused on branding and the front-end design, I enlisted some help with the back-end.
As we built the site, it became clear how stretched our budget was. But once the website launched, it felt like Grime Daily became an overnight success.
Posty worked tirelessly, spamming DJs, Facebook friends, and MySpace users with links to "grimedaily.com." In no time, we were pulling thousands of users daily. I was constantly refreshing the site with new graphics and headers, but soon, we faced a new challenge—we were running out of content.
At first, we relied on old freestyles and DVD clips, but that wasn’t sustainable. So we started making our own content. My connection with J2K helped kick things off, and after one interview, Posty and Pierre began cranking out fresh content.
It felt like, for the first time, the grime scene had a real-time narrative. YouTube wasn’t really a thing back then—it was more of a platform for random viral videos or a place to host clips to embed on MySpace. But for us, the website was the destination, and soon enough, we had daily content rolling in.
The real challenge came when we had to scale. As traffic increased, our bloated WordPress site, full of plugins, couldn't handle the bandwidth.
We had no income and no cash to invest in a better server, so we were stuck in a constant battle to keep the site running. Every time we upgraded the server, our traffic grew, and the loop started again.
This wasn’t just a short-term issue—it lasted for years. And just as we started to get on top of it, Giggs happened.
Giggs was arguably the hottest rapper at the time, and he was giving us exclusive content to premiere. But the problem was, he was sending us too much traffic. Every time we dropped a Giggs exclusive, the server would crash.
By 2012, we finally managed to scale up the operation, but not by choice.
We were a massive success, hitting millions of views each month, and while keeping the website alive was still a constant struggle, it was a good problem to have—until it wasn’t.
Our YouTube channel, which had quietly grown to 150K subscribers and was generating 4 million views a month, got terminated.
We lost everything—an archive of legacy videos, cult moments, and history. All gone, never to be recovered. It felt like the longest week of my life.
The irony? Eight years later, the story continues as a YouTube Original. *Together We Rise* captures the growth of the entire grime scene, as seen through the rise of GRM Daily. It’s crazy to look back on how far we’ve come. You can watch it all unfold here.
Grime Daily—now GRM Daily—became more than just a blog. It’s a platform that helped shape the UK music scene as we know it.
Part One
