The Manager & Label

Looking after other people’s releases as well as your own? The release information lives in a group chat, the metadata gets typed at midnight, and the moment you're doing this for more than one artist the notes-app approach stops being charming.

The five release-ops tabs you don't get in The Artist

• Label Roster. One list the whole team reads from.
• Release Catalogue. Everything else keys off this.
• Track Metadata. Writer splits, ISRC and AI disclosure. A misspelled artist name splits a streaming profile; this is where that never happens.
• Release Assets. What exists, what's missing, who's making it.
• Distributor One-Pager. Type a catalogue number and the top half fills itself. Export it and the distributor has what it asked for, weeks early.

What comes with every edition

The planning and money spine: a One-Page Plan that sets the campaign, a 12-Month Planner, the Content Planner with A-B-C storylines, an Ad Budget with floors and a per-city calculator, the Calculators, a Pitch Tracker with lead times, the Gig P&L, the Grants pathway, a Fan Funnel, and Decision Guides that hand back a verdict once you feed them your numbers.

33 tabs in total. The $150 over The Artist buys those five tabs and nothing else; everything under them is the same file. This is also the manager and label edition, with the roster layer built in.

Is this you yet

Worth it the moment you're handling releases for anyone other than yourself. If it's only your own music, save the $150 and take The Artist. If you also program, book or route live, The Lot carries both sides.

The details

• Real spreadsheet formulas, not a pretty database. Change one number and the rest answers back. Works in Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers.
• Market packs for the UK, US, Canada, Europe, NZ and Australia. The structures work anywhere; the dollar figures are cells you edit.
• Will you use it? It's built for the first twenty minutes. Open it, fill in the light grey cells on four tabs, then look up. Every workbook comes with a worked example filled in end to end, so you're never starting from a blank page.
• Picked the wrong edition? We swap it free, whenever you notice. Changed your mind? Full refund within 14 days, no interrogation. Or buy up any time and pay only the difference, because your downloads page credits what you already paid. Refunds, plainly.
• Kept current. Rates and references get re-checked through the year, and your link always serves the latest version.
• One purchase covers your team: you, the artists you work with, and the people inside your projects. Copy it per campaign and per artist. Don't resell it or post it publicly; it's priced so you don't have to.

Questions people ask

Isn't this just a template?
A template is blank and passive. This carries a worked example and a sample project, so you see normal numbers before you type your own, and the notes explain why each one matters.

Do I need to be a marketer?
No. The writing is plain English and it teaches the few terms worth knowing as you go. Every tab has hover notes written for someone with no marketing background.

Is it a course?
No. Nothing to complete, no modules, no videos to get through. A course teaches you things; this does the work with you.

A spreadsheet, in 2026?
A spreadsheet, on purpose. The maths has to run itself, and a database that looks nice can't do that. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers, and the first open takes a moment while the formulas compute.

We're In Cahoots. These are working tools for independent music, written down so you can run them yourself.