Outside of natural born talent or years of training, professionals working in the creative industries are constantly looking for secret ingredients to navigate the music industry’s complexities and make their sauce special. One of the best ways to find these ingredients is by participating in the open source community that drives innovation. In tech, open source philosophy encourages open collaboration. If you take, you must give. The more you give the more you become inspired. The more you teach, the more you innovate.

While there are plenty of books about the music business, the trial-by-fire nature of the industry often leaves aspiring executives and creatives alike without nurturing mentors or clear philosophies and guidelines to follow. Some corners of the business actively shun question-asking. This atmosphere primarily promotes learning through constant observation and osmosis. To make matters worse, the industry’s cratering at the start of the 2000s meant the firing of many who could have passed on institutional knowledge (and the retention of employees who may have hoarded information or resources in hopes of fending off their obsolescence).

Data lies at the heart of many of the industry’s issues. Few comprehensive tools exist for organizing metadata, contract information, or consumption statistics. The lack of tools that unify and connect this information only makes it more difficult for managers to properly keep track of their client’s work and understand its full value.

Other industries use Salesforce to tremendous effect to both organize and act on relationships. In music, we’re mostly left to emails, texts, and tools like Slack and Asana to hack together solutions for managing and developing connections. Nothing will ever replace genuine connection and deep, long-standing personal ties, but our industry lags behind others in our understanding of relationship management.

Hand-in-hand with collaboration technology, managers need tools that better enable them to understand budgets, project goals, paperwork, deliverables, and project progress. Like so much information in music, these pieces often live scattered across email accounts, Dropbox folders, text exchanges, and accounting programs. It’s difficult to get a comprehensive overview of a project’s logistics in one glance and to make informed decisions on the best ways to proceed.

We spend tremendous energy coordinating musical collaborations and cataloging the fruits of recording sessions. Good data practice begins at the source—from the point of creation when producers and engineers are capturing musical ideas, labeling them, and ultimately keeping track of the people involved in the process of making a song. Seepage often begins here, as collaborators may be forgotten, intentionally left off, improperly listed, or, just as commonly, have disputes about the extent of their involvement in a song’s creation. While certain advances have been made for software that captures music after the process is complete , it’s still as difficult as ever to accurately capture the creative process from beginning to end. The weight of this inefficiency often comes crashing down on managers left to pick up the pieces as they scramble to put together releases.

As managerial titan Shep Gordon put it, “the three most important things a manager does...one is get the money, two is always remember to get the money, and three is never forget to always remember to get the money.” While plenty of accounting tools and software exist, little is tailored towards the music business in a way that provides a comprehensive overview of revenue streams, royalties, collected money, owed money, budgets, and expenses. It should go without saying, but in order for managers and artists alike to properly navigate a career, good business management practices should be implemented early. Without simple, unified tools, it’s difficult to create a clear picture of an artist’s cash flow and, more importantly, the worth of their work. Furthermore, these tools should be more achievable and available in a digital world.

The industry’s existing “standard” for insights has proven largely superficial—statistics that loosely sketch demographic info without digging too deep into audience member specifics or consumer behavior. While Spotify Artist Insights and Soundcloud’s back-end can certainly help an artist understand their fan base broadly, these public programs stop short of providing the kind of deep dive artists and their teams require in the quest to identify and connect directly with their audience. On the business end, no tools enable creators and managers to make decisions based on historical information and past decisions—a log of a manager’s choices usually exists in emails and as a kind of refined gut instinct, occasionally informed by data. The result is an alarming number of decisions that are still made on feel and outdated precedent, untethered to real consumption numbers or a nimble negotiating touch.

When creators and business people alike speak of independence, they’re seeking the ability to assemble infrastructure that suits their needs without forcing them to compromise their vision. This principle governs the elements surrounding creation as much as creation itself, extending to mental health and wellness, all the way to understanding how contracts work and the evolution of how we interact with them.