MBW Views is a series of op/eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Simon Wills, Managing Director of UK-headquartered Absolute Label Services and lead on the new Anthology Music Operating System.
For the last two decades, the industry has bought tools to manage an increasingly complex eco-system. Distribution portals, royalty dashboards, analytics platforms, marketing suites, rights databases… Each one of them useful in their narrow, specialist application, but none of them complete.
So companies adapted. They hired people to glue systems together, built spreadsheets, reconciled numbers manually, and pulled together periodic reports. They accepted that running a music business meant living across multiple accounts across myriad third party platforms and hoping nothing important slipped through the cracks.
The music industry relied on an ever-growing SaaS (Software as a Service) marketplace, as new problems were met with new software solutions. Music companies bolted on more and more third party platforms to their businesses.
That marketplace became ripe for big money acquisitions.
Across data analytics platforms, royalty dashboards, or some other specialist operations portal, there have been plenty of headlines over more than a decade: whether it’s Musicmetric being bought by Apple, The Echo Nest by Spotify, or more recently Curve’s original move to Downtown and, last year, RSDL.io going to Warner’s ADA.
Downtown’s FUGA, whose catalog management and data analytics platform became a go-to for the indie sector, along with all the data that it ingested over time, will have been no small part of Downtown’s appeal in UMG’s eyes.
(Of course, when it comes to Universal, the company has bought much more than FUGA in its Downtown acquisition, and will have to divest Curve).
But this may be the last time that focused-feature SaaS platforms are the target of big spending corporations – simply because siloed SaaS infrastructure no longer works for companies operating in an increasingly complex music market.
Over time, our industry has settled into a fragmentation trap: where operational workflows are tentatively held together by a tangled web of third-party apps, leading to problems spotted too late, teams drowning in admin, growth that adds more work than upside and smart people stuck reconciling data instead of building artists.
In 2026, even moderately sized independent music companies deal with a dizzying array of rights, DSPs, formats, territories, revenue lines, reporting obligations and marketing channels. As a result, they take on more operational risk than ever before.
When it comes to ROI, the ‘more tech’ strategy plateaued and is now creating a drag on the revenue, resources, efficiency and creativity of music companies.
It’s this realization that explains why investors are starting to draw a hard line between software that shows information and operating systems that actually help run businesses.
This isn’t just happening in the music industry, it’s global. As Don Muir wrote for Forbes recently: ‘The SaaS-pocalypse has begun’, wiping $330bn in market value as major SaaS-based companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, and Workday each dropped around 7 percent in a single day at the start of February, with Intuit falling nearly 11 percent. In attributing a shift in market sentiment, Muir distinguished between legacy SaaS platforms, and AI-oriented workflows.
Traditional SaaS does one thing well: it tells you what happened, but it still relies on humans to interpret, coordinate, follow up and execute. More dashboards create more work, rather than reducing it.
Disregard the AI chatbot buzz. Outside of that spotlight, when implemented carefully and with purpose, AI has enabled a new class of tech system that connects information automatically, flags problems before they escalate, coordinates workflows across teams, and helps move from signal to action faster.
And it does the above across every part of a music rights business’ operation: from vinyl stock and sales to streams, socials and neighbouring rights… The Agentic Music OS will soon become the standard for music entrepreneurs.
Agentic Music OS software does not simply present slices of information for interpretation – instead, with installed knowledge of a company’s wider goals and processes, it has the ability to not only display a business in its entirety, but interpret data and act towards a goal until human intervention or direction is optimal.
While caution still rightly exists around mainstream AI output, such trepidation is eradicated when a bespoke LLM has been trained with proper guardrails for a single sector – as someone who worked first-hand with developers to train Absolute’s in-house AI assistant Ant for Anthology, I have experienced the difference.
Over the next few years, in the battle between the major music groups, snapping up a narrow focused, last gen rights platform will no longer be considered a gamechanger. That is if legacy SaaS platforms are even making the headlines at all, as investors recalibrate toward AI-native growth expectations.
More broadly, we will see independents in particular competing on new levels thanks to the efficiency, insight and scalability made possible by Music OS infrastructure.
Music Business Worldwide
