"Artists are expected to behave like marketers, analysts, project managers, and strategists — often without any support or learned expertise."
By Diego Monje, founder of Cactus Music
For most independent musicians, releasing music has quietly become a second (or third!) full-time job.
Writing a great song used to be the hard part.
Now the biggest challenges often start after the music is finished: uploading releases in advance, starting a pre-save campaign, pitching to playlists, planning launch dates and strategy, analyzing the data, coordinating social media, studying algorithms and trends — every release requires a surprising amount of operational marketing work that nobody is prepared for.
Over the last decade, I’ve worked with hundreds of independent artists through my marketing agency, and one pattern kept repeating itself. The artists who succeeded weren’t necessarily the most talented ones. They were the ones who managed to build a system around their releases.
They actually had structure. They had planning. They had some form of operational discipline behind their music.
Most artists do not.
What they usually had in their arsenal was a chaotic mix of disparate tools: a distributor dashboard in one tab, analytics in another, spreadsheets somewhere else, maybe a marketing plan buried in a Google Doc. Everything works, but nothing really works together.
Meanwhile, the industry is rapidly embracing artificial intelligence. Major platforms are investing heavily in AI for discovery, recommendation systems, and content generation. New tools appear every week promising to automate creative work or generate music itself. But the everyday operational challenges of artists — the real work of releasing music and getting it heard — remain largely unsolved.
That gap is what led me to start thinking about something I call Artist Ops.
In startups, “Ops” refers to the systems that make everything run: processes, tools, and workflows that allow companies to operate efficiently. Without operations, even great ideas collapse under their own weight.
Artists face a very similar challenge. A music career today isn’t just exploring one's creativity. It’s coordination. Planning. Campaign execution. Understanding data. Managing releases over time. Yet most artists are still expected to do all of this manually. This is where AI can actually become useful — not as a replacement for creativity, but as infrastructure.
At Cactus Music, we started building tools that help artists structure the operational side of their careers. Instead of replacing human creativity, the goal is to support the planning and decision-making that surrounds a release, by centralizing your launches, campaigns, and data on a single platform.
AI can analyze a track and generate insights useful for pitching platforms. It can help identify similar artists and markets where the music may resonate. It can suggest campaign strategies based on previous releases and performance data. These are small pieces individually. Together, they form something much bigger: a system that helps artists run their careers more intentionally.
For independent musicians, this matters more than ever.
The barriers to releasing music have all but disappeared, but the complexity of building an audience has grown dramatically. Artists are expected to behave like marketers, analysts, project managers, and strategists — often without any support or learned expertise.
Technology has transformed nearly every part of the music ecosystem, but artists themselves still lack operational tools designed specifically for them. That’s the opportunity.
AI doesn’t have to replace musicians. In fact, its most meaningful impact may be helping artists stay focused on what they do best: creating music.
Everything else — the planning, the structure, the campaign infrastructure — can finally start to catch up. And when artists have better systems behind their work, the music has a much better chance of reaching the people for whom it was meant.
Cactus Music was founded in 2013 in Chile as an independent label focused on developing emerging artists. During its early years, the company worked closely on artist development and release strategies, while building strong international networks through participation in key industry events such as MIDEM, Primavera Pro, Circulart, WOMEX, and SXSW. In 2024, the team launched Artist Ops by Cactus Music, a platform that integrates marketing, data, and AI to support artists and teams in executing campaigns more efficiently.
