JORDANWorks

DISCOVERED.

NYU Abu Dhabi commissioned a discovery engagement around one question: should we launch a flagship music festival? I spent a week on campus — not reviewing documents from London, but sitting in the rooms where the real conversations happen: leadership, operations, faculty, the politics of the place.

Most of that week was getting people to talk honestly. Inside a university everyone has a mandate and a budget and a belief system, and a commercial brief lands differently depending on where you sit. Departments were guarded with each other. They weren't guarded with me — and by the end of the week I was holding the honest version of every position at once, which nobody inside the building could do.

The institution was ready to expand — fifteen years of credibility, audience and world-class facilities behind it. But a festival launched cold would have been operationally heavy, commercially high-risk, and dependent on outside investment from day one. The first decade had been about establishment: building infrastructure, attracting talent, earning trust. The next had to be about authorship — not simply hosting culture, but creating it and exporting it with intention. From presenter to producer.

The festival isn't the starting point. It's the destination.

DESIGNED.

A commercial IP platform of five sequenced verticals: recording studio and label, summer music retreat, live events programme, executive education, and the festival. Each one builds the audience and revenue the next one needs, so the platform funds its own ambition as it grows. The retreat runs in the dark months when the campus empties out. The studio starts generating owned IP straight away.

I named it, branded it, modelled it over five years and delivered it as a board-ready blueprint, with governance that protects the institution's artistic integrity while the commercial engine builds around it.

the platform builds the runway.

DIRECTING.

I presented the blueprint to the Chief Information Officer and the Executive Director of Strategic Commercial Partnerships, and it became the plan.

It's still the plan. Regional conflict has paused budgets and closed the campus for now, but the work hasn't stopped. I'm still advising, and the blueprint has gone to one of the world's largest live entertainment companies as a potential partner across the whole platform rather than just the festival. The festival is still coming. When it arrives, it will land on a runway built to carry it.

this is how Jordan works.

DISCOVERED.

I started at Ibiza Rocks in 2009, working seasons. This was years before I had a framework. It was just my job. I came up booking support slots: one live show a week, every Wednesday, credible bands that nobody else on the island was putting on. The headliners were booked above me and my job was everything underneath — find the artist who's a year or two out from headlining themselves. Clean Bandit, Rudimental and Bastille all played support slots I booked before they came back to headline.

Then the market moved. Youth culture wasn't only about bands anymore, and a whole sound had nowhere to go on our lineup: bass, garage, grime, UK rap. So I built it a home. We Are Rockstars, 2012 — my first piece of original IP. Disclosure played the first one as an opening act. Stormzy's #Merky residency ran there in 2016, the first grime residency the island had seen.

Underneath all of it the economics didn't work. One headliner, seven till midnight — and five hours in Ibiza isn't long enough for a crowd to spend what a show costs. The gigs lost money on their own and we justified them because they filled hotel rooms. That couldn't hold forever.

they came for a few hours. the building needed the whole day.

DESIGNED.

We'd run a few small pool parties as tests over the years and they always felt like they were pointing at something. What I could see was a Vegas-style pool party residency: one artist, every week, all season, the whole day given over to it. Craig David was coming back into culture at exactly the right moment, so I proposed him as our first resident. It worked straight away.

Then Andy, our CEO, stood on the balcony and looked down at the pool. People were dancing in it. He said: “Jordan, I've just seen the next ten years of Ibiza Rocks.”

The pool was never an amenity. It was the dancefloor. Six hours, sometimes eight, multiple artists across the day. People ate, they drank, they didn't leave. The gig model lost money and sold rooms. The pool party did both jobs at once. Under my own directorship I rebuilt the season around residencies — daytime was becoming the new nighttime and nobody had built for it yet. I wrote the proposals myself and went after talent we'd had no access to in years, Rudimental and MK, with an offer nobody else on the island could make: own your daytime residency, curate it, make it yours. Both said yes. They joined DJ EZ, Sonny Fodera, Craig David and Elrow, one of the biggest party brands in the world.

DIRECTED.

For nearly five years I directed the talent, programming and brand of the transformation — multi-million budgets, partnerships with Pernod Ricard, JD Sports, MTV, Channel 4 and the BBC, and the standard held on all of it: how it looked, how it felt, how it sounded. Show by show, that was the job. The Kooks closed the 2017 live series on 5 September, twelve years after they'd played the very first Ibiza Rocks season as an unsigned band. The live show never came back. Everything after that was the new model, and the hotel became The Home of the Pool Party. It still is.

DISCOVERED.

I booked Stormzy's first Ibiza show in July 2015, supporting Dizzee Rascal. Standing in that crowd, it was obvious how many people were there for him. Later that summer a slot opened up and I gave him his own headline show — the first time we'd ever taken an act from support to headliner in a single season. The year after, a four-show #Merky residency under We Are Rockstars.

Then I went back and asked for more shows across the season, and the answer was no. He'd done it, he'd moved on, and more of the same wasn't interesting to him. Which was fair. A booking is a transaction, and a transaction wasn't going to move his career or the culture around him. I didn't want to lose him. Our audience loved him and he loved us. So the question stopped being how many shows and became: what has nobody ever done here before?

he didn't need more shows. he needed a bigger idea.

DESIGNED.

#Merky Festival. His brand, my format. Stormzy curating an entire lineup of artists and peers from within the scene, and the culture transporting itself to Ibiza for a whole day — pool party through to nighttime — in a place that had never made room for it. I sent the idea to his agent as a short email: the vision, what I was proposing, why it would work. He took it to the team and came back: let's go.

Their one condition was exclusivity. Nobody else could do a festival at Ibiza Rocks. Venues normally ask that of artists. It rarely runs the other way — and when it does, it tells you what you've actually made. His team proposed the lineup and I did the rest: contacted every agent, negotiated every deal, booked every artist. And I kept designing it, year on year, adding to the format each time it came back.

venues ask artists for exclusivity. this ran the other way.

DIRECTED.

Three editions, growing every year — one day into two, the fastest-selling shows we'd ever done. By 2019 he was headlining it the same week he headlined Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage. We took London's Black culture to an island that had never given it a home, and we built one. That's the part that mattered. Then it outgrew the town and the venue that made it. It never went anywhere else. #Merky Festival happened three times, in one place, and then it was over.

DISCOVERED.

The World Cup was coming to America, and Levi's was at the table with Black Arrow FC — the platform at the centre of Black football culture — exploring a match-day cultural programme rooted in community rather than tournament sponsorship. I'd been working with Black Arrow since representing the brand during my time as an agent at WME. The ambition was real, and the partnership was right. But nobody had yet asked the question that decides everything: what would it actually take to build?

DESIGNED.

Home Soil was architected to answer that question properly. The hardest problem was rights. FIFA restricts commercial broadcast tightly and Levi's weren't an official sponsor, so the whole concept could have died on compliance. I designed the framework that made it work — and that was the direction they approved.

Then the model had to serve three things at once. Levi's held apparel IP with five football federations, so those nations had to carry the fixture list, with the fashion woven through the concept rather than bolted on. Los Angeles had the diasporas to fill a venue for those games. And the group stage was the only part of the tournament anyone could guarantee, so that's what we modelled: real fixtures, real venue economics, across multiple scenarios. Interactive financial models exposed exactly what the programme would cost, what it would need to raise and where the margin lived.

DECIDED.

The blueprint gave the team what a pitch never could: the whole truth. This was a build we believed in — designed to be built, costed to be trusted. And because the numbers were honest, the decision could be too. Weighing the real investment against the work it would take, the team made the call themselves: not this time. The idea didn't move forward, and that was the work working — a genuine decision, made with confidence, before the money moved.

DISCOVERED.

Harvey is the DJs' DJ — one of the most revered selectors alive — and he'd stayed away from Ibiza. Every promoter offered him the same thing: a big room, a big fee, two hours. But for Harvey it was never about the money.

I was introduced to his team in 2015. He didn't want a standard club booking. He wanted somewhere to play, somewhere to own, and somewhere to build a legend. We had the room for it: Freddie's, the small club inside Pikes, where Freddie Mercury threw his 41st birthday. Seventy people, maybe a hundred.

the island offered him big rooms. what he wanted was a small one.

DESIGNED.

We couldn't compete on fee. What we could do was build the whole thing around him. Free entry. All night long: ten-hour sets, sundown to sunrise, every Monday, six to eight weeks a summer. DJs he'd chosen himself played poolside as the evening started, but nobody warmed up Freddie's. He opened the room and he closed it, and he took you the whole way. Nowhere else on the island would give him that, because a ten-hour set means one artist, one room, one night. That was the design, not the compromise.

Then we handed him the rest of it. He curated the food people ate before they came. He chose the flowers, for their scent. He tuned the sound system, planned the lighting, and set how fast the mirror ball turned. Pikes eventually made it official and named him Cultural Attaché. The door was part of it too: guest list, over-25s, a picker turning people away on feel, because in a room that size the crowd is the room. And it stayed free even once it became one of the hottest parties on the island. That was the ethos. Every year we imported a hand-made rotary mixer for him from his friend in Japan, because that was how he got the sound he wanted.

what we couldn't offer in fee, we offered in feel.

Then it compounded into IP. In 2017 Pikes launched a record label — the first in its history — and I ran the release: the distribution deal, the clearances, the marketing and the creative, sitting between Harvey and the distributor the whole way through. I'd never worked in the record business before. I directed it anyway. The first release was The Sound of Mercury Rising. The sleeve says “Pulled together by” and lists four names: Harvey, his manager, the distributor, and me. It's a treasured record in my collection.

DIRECTED.

Ten years on, Mercury Rising still runs — same small room, still free, Harvey still playing all night. Still choosing the flowers, I'd imagine.