I went to Music Biz this year with a clear goal for Octave: start building real relationships that eventually turn into business and into a community. Not just collecting business cards, but making sure the right people in the room knew I existed, knew what I was building, and knew I was ready to be part of their world.
I met people across almost every corner of this industry: publishers, awards and recognition people, connectors with access to bigger networks than mine, producers, composers, founding band members, entrepreneurs, developers, tech people, live music professionals, coaches, and managers. What made those conversations valuable wasn’t the exchange of a card or a follow. It was showing up consistently, in conversation after conversation, as someone who understood both sides of this industry: the creative side and the operational side underneath it.
The theme that kept surfacing: the data is a mess
I didn’t have one single lightning-bolt moment at the conference. What I had instead was a pattern. Across dozens of conversations with people in very different roles, I kept noticing the same handful of themes rising to the surface, and one in particular hit close to home for what Octave does.
As an artist myself, every song I release sends data into a DSP or some other part of the machine, and I’m trusting that all of those entities are tracking my music and my revenue correctly. Sitting in these conversations at Music Biz, I kept hearing the same thing confirmed from the business side now, not just the artist side: the data underneath this industry is a genuine mess. There have been real efforts to standardize it, but there’s still a long way to go.
That’s not a minor operational footnote.
- That’s royalties.
- That’s revenue.
- That’s whether artists actually get paid what they’re owed.
One conversation in particular, with my marketing consultant, helped me connect the dots between my music background and my CRM and marketing experience in a way I hadn’t fully articulated before. But it was hearing that same pain point echoed by people working inside publishing and administration, over and over, that turned it from a hunch into something I knew was worth building. That’s where the idea for Octave’s music data hygiene consulting practice really took shape: not as a theory I came up with in isolation, but as a need I heard confirmed, unprompted, by the people actually living inside that mess every day.
Why this matters for Octave going forward
Octave exists to take music tech companies, and others like artist management firms, music lawyers, publishing and catalog organizations, and indie record labels, from data mess to data nirvana, and this trip reinforced that the mess is bigger, and more universally felt, than I might have assumed working from inside my own client base. It’s not an isolated problem for a handful of companies. It’s a structural issue that touches publishing, admin, royalties, and every entity trying to keep track of a song’s life after it’s released.
That’s the kind of validation you can’t get from a survey or a LinkedIn post. It comes from being in the room, hearing it from a producer one hour and a publisher the next, and realizing they’re describing the same problem in different language.
The relationships I built in Atlanta are already turning into real conversations. But the bigger return was walking away with a sharper, more accurate read on where the real friction is in this industry, and a clear, validated reason to keep building Octave’s data hygiene practice around solving it.
