Protect What You Love (Part 7)

One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over the years is that not every opportunity is worth taking.

That might sound obvious, but when you’re building something from nothing, every opportunity feels important. Every new platform promises more exposure. Every collaboration sounds exciting. Every trend feels like something you should jump on before it’s too late. It’s very easy to convince yourself that saying yes to everything is the only way to succeed.

When Free To Use Sounds began in 2017, I knew almost immediately that recording sounds was what I wanted to do. Not because I thought it would become a business, but because I simply couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to understand microphones, acoustics, sound engineering, editing, metadata, licensing, and everything else connected to field recording. There were weeks when we probably worked more than a hundred hours without even realizing it because we were genuinely excited to learn.

It never felt like work.

It felt like discovery.

As our sound library slowly grew, so did our online presence. We started a YouTube channel about field recording and began sharing videos on Instagram. At first, it felt like the perfect combination. We could continue recording sounds while showing people a behind-the-scenes look at what we were doing.

Then something unexpected happened.

A few of our Geofón and contact microphone videos went viral.

Suddenly, millions of people were watching our work.

At first, it was exciting. Like anyone else, we enjoyed seeing the numbers climb. Watching a video reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of views gives you a rush, and for a while we genuinely believed this was the direction we should keep pursuing.

But slowly, without even noticing it, our priorities began to change.

Instead of asking ourselves, “What sounds should we record next?” we found ourselves asking, “How do we make another viral video?”

That was a completely different question.

We started spending hours brainstorming ideas, filming, editing, and analysing performance. Sometimes we’d even remove a video because it hadn’t performed as well as the previous one. Looking back, that seems almost absurd. We weren’t deleting videos because we were unhappy with them. We were deleting them because a number on a screen told us they weren’t successful enough.

The irony was impossible to ignore.

The more time we spent chasing views, the less time we spent doing the one thing that had inspired us to start this journey in the first place.

Recording sounds.

Over the years we’ve become friends with several travel creators, and I have enormous respect for what they do. Creating content for YouTube is incredibly demanding. You’re constantly thinking about the next destination, the next thumbnail, the next story, and whether the algorithm will reward all the work you’ve just invested.

That lifestyle simply wasn’t for us.

We didn’t want to become content creators.

We wanted to become better sound recordists.

Those are two very different goals.

Ironically, social media eventually became one of the smallest income streams in our business while demanding one of the biggest portions of our attention. That’s when we realised we were slowly drifting away from the reason we had started Free To Use Sounds in the first place.

So we made a decision.

We stopped chasing trends.

We stopped worrying about making viral videos.

And we stopped creating content simply because we felt like we were supposed to.

Instead, we went back to recording sounds.

Today my days are wonderfully simple.

I might spend the morning writing an article like this before packing my recording gear and heading into the city. Sometimes I’ll spend ten hours walking through streets, parks, train stations, or markets searching for interesting sounds. Other days I’ll stay on the balcony waiting for a thunderstorm to roll in. In the evening I’ll edit those recordings, upload them to our All In One Bundle or Bandcamp, and somewhere in the world someone might purchase them while I’m asleep.

Even after all these years, that still feels incredible.

What I love most is that our business doesn’t tell us where to go, what to record, or how many videos we need to publish this week. We’ve deliberately built a business that supports the lifestyle we wanted instead of creating a lifestyle that serves the business.

I think that’s an important distinction.

People often believe success comes from adding more.

More followers.

More platforms.

More opportunities.

More content.

Our experience has been almost the opposite.

Some of the best decisions we’ve ever made were the things we decided to stop doing.

Protecting what you love isn’t always about working harder.

Sometimes it’s about having the courage to say no.

Because once you know what truly matters to you, letting go of everything else becomes surprisingly easy.