How we got here
The name was right and it was wrong.
It started with a search for one of the artists on my DIY micro-label. The artist had released a new EP under their usual artist name, a pseudonym. It was the name we submitted to the distributor and the name we expected to see in public. But the search results showed that on at least one streaming service, the EP was listed under the artist’s legal name instead.
The legal name wasn’t false, and it didn’t come out of nowhere. We provided it to identify the rights holder through an IPI number. But it wasn’t supposed to be public. For artists who publicly use their legal name, or a version of it, this might not be a problem. For those who deliberately separate their legal and public identities, it very much is.
My first concern was getting it corrected, but the questions that followed were harder to answer. How did information supplied for one clear purpose end up being used for another? It wasn’t provided that way, so how did this happen? Had the same thing happened anywhere else? If this piece of information had moved into the wrong place, what else might have changed? How many systems did the EP have to pass through before reaching a listener’s ear? Which parts could I trust?
I had no practical way to answer those questions. I could see the result, but not the path the information had taken to get there, or what might have changed along the way.
I started the label about ten years ago. It’s a tiny DIY micro-label. Nearly everything about it is bespoke. It was built to be a sort of laboratory for me. I started it out of curiosity, with a big dose of pent-up frustration behind it.
I’d been involved in music in one form or another for as long as I can remember. I made music for different reasons, under various guises, and with trusted people for a long time. I understood the parts of the business I thought I needed to understand. Much of that knowledge came from before streaming became the dominant way recorded music was distributed and heard.
What I knew didn’t always align with what I was experiencing, and it wasn’t just me.
Royalty statements are the classic example artists can relate to. Each quarter might bring a happy surprise or a disappointment. Either way, the numbers rarely made much sense. To call the statements vague would be an understatement. Sometimes I’d investigate and compare a statement with what I thought had happened, just to try to make sense of it. Each time I’d only end up more confused, so I’d set it aside and tell myself it was a battle for another day. There was music to make and a life to get back to.
I didn’t start the label to build a scene, a brand, or a genre. Before I committed to it, I spoke to a lot of people, seeking their advice and perspectives. Some were old friends with major-label experience. Others were industry back-office veterans.
When I told them I was particularly interested in the mechanics and the systems music travels through, they stared at me blankly, as if it was futile. But I wanted to understand how it all worked. I wanted to know what happened after music was finished and sent out into the world, and how the music and its information traveled through the plumbing of the industry, if you will.
Not one of the people whose counsel I sought could explain the whole picture. Not the artists, not the lawyers, not the operations people. Everyone understood a slice of it. And with that, and some hubris, my label was born, and I threw myself in.
Starting a label is easy in theory. There are plenty of guides that explain much of it, though most grossly oversimplify it. So I read books. Dense ones. Books about publishing and rights administration, and books written by former label bosses recounting their glory days, how they came up in the business, who they discovered and signed, the fallouts and bad deals, lessons learned and wisdom imparted.
As the pieces began falling into place, I found that rights, credits, splits, identifiers, registrations, agreements, territories, royalties, and reporting all intersect across systems that do not necessarily agree with each other. I wondered how many other small labels really get all of this right. More importantly, how was an everyday working artist, without a label team, manager, lawyer, or rights administrator, supposed to navigate all of it?
My label now had a couple of artists willing to play along, which meant it eventually had a small catalog to experiment with. We released music under different projects, with different people, through different distribution methods, and began testing. Each release offered another chance to see how information entered the systems, where it went, and what came back.
Slowly, the machinery started to reveal itself. I didn’t fully understand it, but the dots were starting to connect.
One album, EP, or single could exist in several places at once, but not always in quite the same form. Information submitted to the distributor might be shortened, omitted, mangled, manually re-entered, or simply displayed incorrectly. Some differences were minor and inconsequential. Others changed how the artist, contributors, or entire work was represented. The royalty statements went from vague to cryptic, and more dots connected.
The legal-name error was discovered only because the streaming service’s page had been indexed by a search engine. That made one instance visible. What it didn’t tell me was whether the same information had appeared on any of the many other services operating around the world. I had no way of knowing.
People sometimes speak as though only the largest streaming platforms matter. That might be easy to agree with until a smaller platform gets it wrong. At that point, size and market share are beside the point.
The streaming service was responsive when I contacted them, and the name was corrected. But correcting the error didn’t immediately correct everything downstream because it still appeared in search results for several more months.
The immediate problem was resolved, but the uncertainty wasn’t.
The recording itself didn’t change. The records about it did.
A recording is more than what you hear. There are credits, contributions, agreements, split sheets that record ownership shares, registrations, identifiers, release details, metadata, royalty statements, approvals, and decisions. Some describe the recording. Some describe the composition. Some describe the people involved, the rights they hold, or the relationships between them.
Each is a record, a part of what happened. Who was in the room, who made what, who said yes, and who gets paid. No single record contains the whole story.
The problem is not simply that information can be missing or factually wrong. A true fact can appear in the wrong place, be used for the wrong reason, or be separated from the context that gives it meaning. The legal name of the artist was real, but its public use as an artist name was very wrong. That’s just one entry in the written history of the EP. What happens downstream when a much more critical piece of information is misplaced, omitted, mangled, or wrong, or when there are disputes about any of it?
That changed the questions I was asking. It was no longer enough to know what a system said about works and recordings. I wanted to know where its information came from and what supported it. I wanted to know what that information was meant to describe, and what happened when someone tried to change it. I wanted to know whether an earlier version disappeared or remained, and how that shaped the way the music, the people, the rights, and the data behind it were understood.
The systems that comprise this machine are not all doing the same job. A label, distributor, collection society, publisher, and rights administrator each has its own view of the work. Differences don’t mean that anyone has acted badly, but they have real consequences. The people closest to the work are often left to deal with them.
The industry can deliver a song around the world in seconds. Many months later, the people who made it can still be staring at a royalty statement that makes little sense, wondering where the money went, how, and why.
If any other industry worked this way, it would be a crisis. In music, it’s called being independent.
This is why independence is about much more than the ability to release music without a major label.
Independent artists don’t need to perform every administrative function all by themselves, and they don’t automatically own every right connected to every work. But they should be able, at a minimum, to understand how their work is represented, see where important claims came from, and exercise the authority that is properly theirs.
That requires more than access to information. It requires context.
Arcke did not begin with one error or one moment of inspiration. It developed as I kept following these questions and finding the same conditions in different places. Identities, credits, agreements, rights, registrations, and payments might each be recorded somewhere. Understanding how they relate is another matter entirely.
Arcke is being built to bring all of those records into view and into context while preserving where they came from and how they changed over time. We’re starting with a narrow and sharp focus: catalog and rights information for music already released. The larger responsibility is to make the records behind independent music more understandable and accountable to the people whose work gives them meaning.
In the end, the artist’s name was put right. But once I had seen the machinery fail in this particular way, it was difficult to stop looking, and look I did. The more I looked, the more questions and contradictions were exposed, the full scope of which went far beyond one name field, one platform, or one release.
Years after starting the label, during a routine royalty audit, I found myself once again neck-deep in administration over a comparatively tiny catalog, asking why it had to be this way, feeling the same frustration and confusion.
The answer I arrived at was simple: it doesn’t.
That is how we got here.