The Second Floor started where the name says: one flight up at 78 Friday Street, Leicester, inside Unchained Music Ltd. We learned growth the honest way: on our own products, with our own money, where a vanity metric costs you rent.
That's why this studio is built on an unusual pairing. The taste of a creative shop (film, identity, big type, work people actually feel) welded to the measurement culture of a performance agency. Brands people love, and the numbers to prove it.
And we're human-first, like the company we grew out of. We use AI every day (for research, tooling, and making sure our clients show up inside it), but the taste, the ideas and the final call always belong to people.
The house rules
Human-first
Taste, ideas and the final call are always human. AI makes us faster and sharper. It doesn't replace the craft.
Culture-first
Made by people who go to the shows. If the work wouldn't survive a group chat, it doesn't ship.
Receipts
Claims get backed with numbers. Weekly updates, no black boxes, no long-term contracts.
From the founder
The Second Floor exists because of a problem we lived. We built Unchained Music from nothing in Leicester, and we learned the hard way that making something great is only half the job. Nobody streams a record they never find. So we became obsessive about the other half: search, answers, the machinery of being discovered, and we grew our own platform 430% doing it.
This studio is that obsession, offered to people like us. Artists, founders, and creative businesses who are brilliant at the work and busy enough already. We make the brand, build the site, and wire up the engine that gets it found, in Google and in AI. Human taste, machine fluency, receipts for everything.
Come up. The kettle's usually on.
Matt Waters · Founder
Repositioned for the culture economy
Client retention rate
Case studies and counting
78 Friday Street, Leicester. Second floor, obviously
Who we work with
Our client list reads like a decent line-up poster. On the artist side: Cam Cole, the one-man band from London; Manchester indie outfit Gathering of Strangers; Leicester alt-rock artist Harri Georgio; and disco and Italo DJ Natasha Kitty Katt. On the brand side: eCommerce names like Amateur Athlete and Eden Goods, plus Unchained Music, the company we grew out of and the first place we proved the playbook. Different rooms, same approach: build something people love, then show the receipts. Browse the full archive on our work page, or see how we work with artists and labels.
"I am so impressed with the service. What a team."Natasha Kitty Katt, DJ · Hï Ibiza and Glitterbox resident