How I Got Started: Tiffany Calver, broadcaster, DJ, writer and British music tastemaker
'How I Got Started' unlocks career secrets so you can make your move. We sit down with people carving their own path to find out what it’s really like to work in certain industries and share practical tips to help you get started.
Tiffany Calver is passionate about leaving the door open. She knows firsthand what it takes to make it in the music industry: she moved to London at 17 with no contacts or prior knowledge and carved out her own incredible path.
In 2019, aged 24, she became the first woman ever to host BBC Radio 1's Rap Show, using her platform to champion fresh talent. She’s also opened for Beyoncé and Jay-Z on their On The Run II tour, alongside traveling across Europe and the UK as Drake's tour DJ.
“People might look at something like DJing for huge musicians or presenting a national radio show and see a big career moment,” she says. “But the part that is actually useful to somebody starting out is the years before that. When nobody knew my name and I was still turning up. That’s the bit I try not to edit out of the story.”
Her secret to success? A mixture of showing up, being curious, making connections and seizing opportunities. Her sheer determination and refreshing honesty make her a perfect host for giffgaff and LOOSE.fm’s Your Way In: Music, part of a project helping people access difficult-to-break-into industries.
I know what it feels like to need someone to take you seriously before there’s any obvious reason for them to. So much of my career exists because somebody played my mix, replied to an email, let me into a room or gave me an opportunity before I had all the proof. I’ve never forgotten that.
Radio really taught me the value of a platform. You realise quite quickly that something which is routine to you can be massive to somebody else. Playing a record might take three minutes of my show, but for that artist it could be the first time they’ve heard themselves on national radio. An introduction that takes me thirty seconds to make could completely change somebody’s year.
Championing people isn’t just posting about them once when they’re already having a moment. It’s playing the record again. It’s putting their name forward when they’re not in the room. It’s sending the email, making the introduction, booking them before everybody else has decided they’re brilliant. If I have access to rooms, platforms or information that I once desperately wanted access to myself, I think I have a responsibility to leave the door a little wider than I found it.
I moved to London at 17 from Telford and I genuinely had no idea how the music industry worked. I didn’t have family in it, I didn’t know the terminology, I didn’t know what half the jobs were called, never mind who I was supposed to email to get one. I also wanted to work in rap at a time when there weren’t many women visible in those spaces, particularly on the broadcasting and DJ side. I spent a lot of time being the only woman in a room and feeling like I had to prove I knew what I was talking about before I was allowed to just enjoy being there.
Curiosity got me through more than confidence. I went everywhere. Talks, gigs, panels, radio stations, screenings, anything where I thought I might learn something. I asked people questions. I watched how they moved. I’d go home and Google every word I didn’t understand. I still have all my notebooks from those days!
I’ve never really enjoyed the idea of networking per se. It feels transactional to me. But I believe massively in showing up. A lot of my career came from being in rooms I technically had no reason to be in yet. That’s also why events that give young people genuine access matter to me now. I still remember being the person sitting at the back trying to work out how everybody at the front got there.
There have been loads of messy bits in my career. Jobs I desperately wanted and didn’t get. Ideas I was convinced would work that didn’t. Periods where I was doing everything I thought I was supposed to be doing and absolutely nothing seemed to be moving. And then there are the less dramatic messy bits: being broke, being exhausted, saying yes to too much because you’re scared the phone will stop ringing, comparing yourself to people whose careers seem to be moving faster than yours, wondering whether you’ve completely misjudged yourself...Those periods teach you things that success can’t.
Success can make you think every decision you made was genius. Failure makes you actually interrogate yourself. What am I good at? What am I avoiding? What do I want when nobody is applauding it? Who am I when this isn’t going particularly well? It also taught me that careers are much less linear than they look afterward. Once somebody has a few big achievements, we retell their story as though everything naturally led to everything else. It didn’t feel like that while I was living it. Trust me.
I actually don’t think I had one big fairy-godmother moment. It was a chain of people saying yes. It's all a domino effect and so many people contribute to those moments. Someone putting my name forward for something I probably wouldn’t have been considered for otherwise. Somebody replying to an email when they could very easily have ignored it. That’s probably shaped the way I think about opportunity more than having one single mentor did.
The person helping you often has no idea how significant the thing they’ve done is. To them, it might be a twenty-minute conversation or forwarding an email. To you, it can completely alter the direction of your life. So I try to remember that now that I’m sometimes on the other side of it. I can’t help everybody and I’m definitely not pretending my inbox is a model of organisation, but I try to reply. I try to introduce people. I try to give context rather than just saying “no”. And if I think somebody is brilliant, I’ll say their name in rooms they’re not in yet because I know how much that means.
Young people are much more comfortable building their own platforms instead of waiting for an institution to validate them, which I love and I'm learning later on in my life. But there’s a trade-off: because everybody has access to the tools, everybody is creating. The volume is enormous. Being talented doesn’t automatically make you visible anymore and some of the traditional entry-level routes where you would quietly learn how the business works have disappeared. There are fewer spaces to be bad privately, assist somebody, observe, learn and gradually become great. So I’d say it’s easier than ever to start and harder than ever to cut through. Different problem. Same need for resilience.
The biggest misconception about working in music and media is that it’s glamorous. It's ADMIN! It’s emails. It’s advancing. It’s airports. It’s chasing invoices. It’s wearing all the hats. The glamorous bit is such a tiny percentage of the actual job.
I don’t really believe in this idea of “the big break”. There have probably been hundreds of tiny breaks in my career. You normally only recognise which ones mattered once you’re looking backward.
Talent is not enough. I think that can sound harsh when you’re young because you’ve spent your whole life being told to work on your craft. Of course you need to be good. But once you enter a professional environment, being good is almost the starting point. Can people trust you? Do you turn up on time? Do you answer your phone? Can you handle something going wrong without making everybody else’s day worse? Are you kind to the person working the door as well as the person who owns the company? I have genuinely booked people who weren’t my first choice because they replied, were reliable and I knew they’d make the job easier.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is nobody is coming to discover you. I definitely spent some time waiting to be picked or noticed. Eventually I realised I could spend that time making something, meeting somebody, starting something or putting myself in the room. You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going, but you do have to move.
Your Next Move
When Tiffany first started out, she immersed herself in the music industry, absorbing knowledge however she could. “Curiosity got me through more than confidence,” she says. “I went everywhere. Talks, gigs, panels, radio stations, screenings, anything where I thought I might learn something.”
Find an event near you in your chosen industry and start your journey. You never know what you might learn or who you might meet. If you aren’t able to make an event IRL, then try tuning into an industry podcast
If you weren’t lucky enough to get tickets to Your Way In: Music, there are plenty of ways to catch up on the conversation. We’ll be posting highlights and takeaways from the event across our blog and social accounts to help people make their next move.
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As told to Brogan Driscoll