Running a music business on spreadsheets.
It works, and it works for longer than people expect. What ends it is never the spreadsheet — it is the second person who needs it.
Keep the thinking. Retire the maintenance.
The logic you built — what gets commissioned, when a split is complete, which deals are unbilled — stops being something you hold up and starts being something the system holds.
Why the spreadsheet exists, and why it was right
Because nothing off the shelf matched how this business actually runs, so somebody sat down and encoded it themselves. Columns for the things that matter here, a tab per client, a formula that works out the commission the way your deals are actually written.
That is not a stopgap and it is not naivety. A team with a working spreadsheet has done the hardest part of the job: it has decided what it needs to know. Most teams never get that far, and any system that replaces it has to start by respecting it.
What actually breaks
The logic lives in one person. Not in the file — in whoever knows why that column is there and what the formula in row 40 is compensating for. The spreadsheet is the artifact; the understanding is the asset, and it is not backed up.
A grid has no idea what a thing is. A cell holding a writer's name is text. It does not know that writer has an identifier, that the same person appears spelled three ways on other rows, or that the shares in this block should add to one hundred. Every one of those rules is real, and every one of them is being enforced by a human being.
Two people editing is one person too many. The moment a second person needs the same numbers, you get a copy, and from then on there are two answers to every question. There is no version of shared editing that also gives you an audit trail of who changed a rate and when.
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 — none of them appear in a sheet, because absence has no row.
It cannot reach the thing it describes. The commission in the sheet has to become an invoice somewhere else. The split in the sheet has to become an agreement somebody signs. Each of those handoffs is a retype, and each retype is where the number changes.
What replaces it, and what does not
The records move; the analysis can stay. Deals, invoices, catalog, splits, statements — those become records in a system that knows what they are and what makes each one complete. A spreadsheet you use to model a scenario or sketch an offer is a good tool and nobody needs to take 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 rather than diligence.
What is missing becomes visible. Gaps are listed, because a system that knows what a complete record looks like can tell you which ones are not.
Each record reaches the next one. The deal raises the invoice. The statement carries its own commission. Nothing is retyped between them, which removes the step where the number drifts.
The honest version of the trade
You give up total freedom over the shape of things. A spreadsheet 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 it is 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
What happens to the spreadsheet 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.
Our spreadsheet 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 that are genuinely specific to how you work are worth telling us about before you decide.
Can we keep using spreadsheets for anything?
Yes, and you should. Modeling a scenario, 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.
We are two people. Is this overkill?
The failure mode is not team size, it is what happens when the person holding the logic is unavailable — and two people is exactly when that starts to cost something. If one of you can already answer every question from memory, the spreadsheet is still working. The moment you find yourself explaining it, it is not.
Keep what you worked out. Stop being the one who maintains it.
