Defected Rejected His Record. Then He Ended Up Running It

A cold email, a chest-infection phone call, a buyout, and 951 sold-out shows since 2021. The CEO of Defected Records on what holds the centre.

Wez Saunders cold-emailed Simon Dunmore in 2013. Two days after a meeting in which Dunmore said he could sell a pen, Wez was home with a chest infection when Dunmore called. He took the club promotions job. Four years later he ran Defected.

In an hour with James Kirkham, Wez traces the line from a dropped Sony Walkman tuned to Kiss FM, through twelve years on the fast track at Deutsche Bank, to the summer of 2008 when his brother was diagnosed with leukemia and died in 23 days. He explains the £265 first quarterly paycheck from his first label that forced him to build an ecosystem rather than one imprint. He walks through the management buyout that made him chairman as well as CEO, the ninety-page manifesto he wrote for staff, and the pendulum metaphor he uses to keep house music's centre still while its edges swing. Then come the numbers: since 2021, Defected has put on 1,033 events outside Ibiza and 951 of them have sold out, against a live scene squeezed by inflation, war in Ukraine, and venue closures. He covers the fifty-plus-show virtual festival run during COVID that reached tens of millions, why a market that has gone from 100,000 songs a day to 140,000 makes brand and provenance matter more not less, and why bands like Jamie Webster and The Lathums may be the early signal of an AI-era backlash. The through-line he keeps coming back to is one word: community.