What Was The RTD Project? [B1X History]

Back between 2006-2008, TDX was heavily influenced by the still fairly new sound of Grime music and the evolution of 4x4 to Bassline which had more deeper bass sounds and started introducing a UKG type style to some songs.

With this obsession, TDX would visit a lot of the blog websites at the time such as GRM Daily, known as Grime Daily before, Link Up TV, Grime Blog and other similar platforms in the field. This eventually would spark the inspiration to create a version of 1 of these platforms for Sheffield and Up North as there wasn't much to allow local talent to platform themselves and it was a lot more difficult for a Sheffield artist to feature on a out of Sheffield platform.

TDX, along with former DJ, DJ Phil Laurence, started work on researching and building a platform like GRM Daily focused on Sheffield talent. These ideas would develop for a year or so going through a number of changes before we settled on what was then RTD Productionz (Reality, Truth & Diversity). We had a number of late nights, raised our own funds for equipment and did a lot of the creative work ourselves where possible to make it happen and eventually launch properly in 2010 on June 22nd featuring 1 of Sheffield's biggest names today, K Dot.

RTD started with going around doing interviews, behind the scenes and freestyle videos, learning as we went and improving our creative craft during the process. It wouldn't take long before they decided to start trying to do music videos which was more Phil's idea as TDX did not have any interest in video editing back then but didnt mind filming.

On September 8th 2010 . This was then followed up with a video release with young and very talented G Man on 27th October 2020 with his track 'Listen To The Words'.

By April 2011, RTD wanted to keep improving on visuals, especially music videos, and started working with Sheffield video mad scienticed Marpz who at the time had not been doing videos long but had a crazy passion for the scene and creativity. The first video he released was with NFS who was a very populer group of young rappers known well locally.

With Marpz focused on video production, Phil focused on website and blog type content and TDX tackling events, music projects and networking, it would not take long for bigger opportunities to come for the team. This included the partnership with Bigga Fish, a Youth engagment and events organisation based on London, that was wanting to expand out of London. To achieve this, they scouted the UK for people to work with in all major cities in the country and with RTD was doing at the time, the team for sure stood out.

The partnerhsip with Bigga Fish would end up being a bit of a turning point for RTD as they would work together for a number of years after, including with community and youth projects/workshops. With memebrs of RTD having their own talents also, this would eventually see TDogg, (TDX), go on tour with Bigga Fish performing as well as helping to organise which aloud the team to learn a lot about the industry.

This then pushed RTD to start trying bigger events themselves and trying to platform local talent alongside bigger names outside of Sheffield. This is when 'Net 2 Road' was created. Net 2 Road, like Bigga Fish, was aimed at giving young talent a platform to showcase themselves and also for more established artists to engage with their supporters via live events and content.

Sheffield has never been short of talent but at the time, the scene in the city was not taken as serious by the authorites, corprates or other potencial sponsors/partners. This meant that we did not have the infistrucutre of a city like London full of radios, PRs, events, record labels and everything else that makes and keeps a scene strong. Due to this, we took our increased skills and knowledge of digital media and decided to take the same energy we have in the undertground scene and face a new challenge in sports to increase revenue while still doing community projects on the side funded by ourselves. Our first independt full project was done during Kell Brook vs GGG after a few months in the boxing circuit interviewing and filming fighters such as Anthony Joshua. The team was very proud of their first project which was all funded themselves including having to travel, stay in hotels and everything else that comes with more production level projects.

This move to sport would eventually see the end of the RTD project as the team got older, finding different interests or just simply loosing the passion as the Sheffield Scene was a lot more political back then which is only nature when something is new full of passionate and talented people hungry to make a scene a success. It is no secret that as an individual, TDX Campbell would be the talent that stood out from the group and would go on to do some big things within sports entertainment as a creative.

We have made efforts with B1X to make sure the history of how we come to be is there for thoes who enjoy a bit of historical information. This post was more to give insight to the basic timeline of the growth of RTD and how TDX ended up becoming so mutlti skilled and impactful in his field. Visit the Beat Blog page for more articles about the other aspects of RTD including the music and roster of talent we worked with back then. You can also visit the RTD Archives page on our website with a mixture of throwback audio, videos and images.