Running a music business in Google Sheets.
It is where almost every team starts, and it is genuinely good at the part it is good at. What ends it is the second person who needs the same answer.
Keep the modeling. Move the records.
Deals, invoices, catalog, splits and statements become records in a system that knows what they are. The sheet you use to work out an offer stays exactly where it is.
Why it is the default, and fairly
It is free, everyone has it, two people can open it at once, and the shape can change on a Tuesday afternoon when the work changes. For a small team writing down what it knows, that is the right trade and nobody should apologize for it.
A team with a working sheet has already done the hardest part: decided what it needs to know. Most never get that far.
What actually breaks
The logic lives in a person, not the file. Whoever knows why that column exists and what the formula in row 40 compensates for is the real system. The sheet is just the artifact, and the understanding is not backed up.
A cell has no idea what it holds. A writer's name is text. The sheet does not know that writer has an identifier, that the same person is spelled three ways further down, or that this block of shares should add to one hundred. Every one of those rules is being enforced by a human being.
Simultaneous editing is not shared understanding. Two people can type at once — that was never the hard part. The hard part is that nobody can tell who changed a rate, when, or why, and there is no version of the truth that is not somebody's tab.
Nothing arrives on its own. Registrations, statements, identifiers: every one is somebody pasting. The sheet is exactly as current as the last hour someone spent on it.
It records what is there, never what is missing. A row you never created is invisible. The song with no writer, the deal never invoiced, the statement that did not arrive — absence has no row.
Sharing is a copy, and a copy is a second answer. The moment a client's lawyer needs one view, somebody duplicates a tab, and from then on there are two versions of everything.
What replaces it, and what does not
The records move; the modeling can stay. Deals, invoices, catalog, splits and statements become records in a system that already knows what makes each one complete. A sheet for sketching an offer or testing a scenario is a good tool and nobody is taking it away.
The rules become the system's job. Whether shares add up, whether a recording is missing an identifier, whether a deal has never been billed — checks, not diligence.
What is missing becomes visible. A system that knows what a complete record looks like can list the incomplete ones. A grid can only show you what was typed into it.
Access is per record, not per copy. A client's attorney or a label contact gets exactly the slice they need, live, without anyone duplicating a tab.
The honest version of the trade
You give up total freedom over the shape of things. A sheet will let you add a column at four in the afternoon; a system with opinions about what a split sheet is will not let you invent a seventh kind of share. That constraint is the product — it is what lets someone else pick the work up — but it is a real trade and worth naming rather than glossing.
What you get back is that the business stops depending on one person remembering. Whoever knows why the formula in row 40 is like that can go on holiday.
Common questions
We collaborate in it fine. Is that not the whole point?
Simultaneous editing works and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What it does not give you is an audit trail of who changed a rate and when, a permission model that can hand one outside party exactly one slice, or any idea of what is missing. Those are different problems from typing at the same time.
What happens to the sheet we already have?
It gets brought across for you. Importing an existing sheet and setting the workspace up is white-glove — the point is that you feel the difference in days, not that you are handed an import template and wished well.
Can we keep using Sheets for anything?
Yes, and you should. Modeling a deal, sketching an offer, working something out — a grid is the right tool for that. What moves is the records that have to be correct, shared, and reachable by the next step.
Our sheet does things no product does. Will we lose that?
Some of it, honestly. A system with opinions about what a deal and a split are will not let you invent an arrangement it has never seen, and that constraint is what makes the records usable by someone other than you. The parts genuinely specific to how you work are worth telling us about before you decide.
Keep the sheet you think in. Move the records you rely on.
