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Max Bernstein runs Relationl, an Airtable development agency for the music industry, with clients including Warner Music Group, Big Machine, and Atlantic Records UK. I've been watching his videos for a while, going "I gotta lock in, I gotta do this more."

What he does should be institutional knowledge at this point, and it is nowhere close.

Max: We develop operational intelligence for the music business. Think of all the things you already use spreadsheets for. It's been my argument since the start that you're already trying to build custom business software for yourself; you just have the wrong implements.

Think of someone who's told to go into the backyard and chop down a tree. They go "Sure, okay, I can do that," and you hand them a garden hose. That's not gonna do the job. You can whack it all day long; it's not gonna do the job. You need the ax, and what the ax is in this case is a relational database.

You need a place where you can construct a single source of information for all the data that powers your business. If you're on the recorded music side, you've got all your artists, and there can be no record of the artist anywhere else other than that one place. Every artist has many releases. Every release has many tracks.

Each of those has attributes. An artist has a bio and a genre. A release has a release date and a type, such as a single, EP, or album. A track has a title, a duration, and a status as to whether it's been mastered or not.

Max: Say you're a manager and your artist is going on tour. You've been tracking the whole thing, the flight numbers, where they need to be and when, who the advancing contacts are at each venue. Then you need all of it to reach the tour manager, and one click sends it over email, one click sends it as a PDF.

What's really worked for us is a portal. There are external tools for this, Glide and Softr among them. You build the portal and in some cases our clients' tour managers, sometimes the artist themself, are carrying a mobile version of your Airtable base around in their phone. They get an alert that the radio interview got canceled, or that one moved.

Jesse: The first time I saw this it was amazing. I was thinking about tour managing a tour for a record label from remote back in the '90s and I'm like, oh my God.

Max: Airtable was my entry point. I started this business delivering it as a service to the music industry because I became an expert at it solving real pain I had. I ran a music marketing agency. I had a label joint venture with a major. I managed artists signed to majors. All of it took off at the same time around 2019 and 2020 and I needed something better than my spreadsheets, so I went out, acquired the skills, hired all the experts to teach me.

After two years operating at that higher level of productivity I thought, I gotta drop everything and just deliver this as a service, because I can't watch my trusted relationships continue to suffer the way they're suffering. Because I know that you and I can have custom business software that used to take millions of dollars and years to create, and build it in a matter of hours, maybe weeks. And if you know what I know, it's free. Think about that. Millions of dollars down to free.

Watch demo here @ [54:25]

Everything sits in three layers.

The bottom is the data layer, the raw back end where the database model lives. Relational services around 10,000 users across the music industry, and Max says roughly 50 of them ever touch it.

The single most important thing in it is the linked record field, the field type that creates a relationship between two tables, and it's the entire trick. One artist has many events, where an event is a live show or a release. An event has many budget line items. A release has many DSP pitches, meaning your pitches to the editorial teams at Spotify, Apple Music, and the rest. A release has many tracks. A track has many roles, so who produced it, who's the side artist, who's the co-writer. You map your actual business as a diagram, then express that diagram in Airtable using these fields.

The middle is the logic layer, which is automations. You drag and drop your way into a JavaScript automation without writing JavaScript, and if you want to go further you can drop in custom scripts. Max runs scripts that hit the Spotify API and the Soundcharts API.

The top is the interface layer, which is what everybody actually touches. If 50 of those 10,000 users work in the back end, the other 9,950 live up here, with permissions set by what department they work in.

One table holds every artist, sortable by genre and territory. Max's point is not to take that literally, because if you're a manager or a solo artist, that same table is your clean database of the Instagram pages, influencers, and press outlets you reach out to.

Open a single artist, and everything about them sits in one place. Socials, a mission statement, working documents, assigned team members, and the release schedule filtered down to just them. Each release lists its tracks and how far A&R admin has gotten on clearing each one. Underneath that is a timeline holding every event attached to that artist: radio promo, marketing beats, performances.

Jesse: Shit, I've never seen that.

Adding a new artist to the roster normally means typing a name, then hunting down their socials, their manager, their numbers. Ten a day is a realistic pace.

Here you type the name and hit create. Airtable calls the Spotify API and pulls the artist in with their socials attached, then calls the Soundcharts API and populates the last 90 days of their TikTok follower count, so a growth curve lands on the record within seconds. Max did this live with an artist I picked at random, tsubi club, and it filled itself in while we talked.

Max: You look at that and go, okay, I'm not early early, because it's been growing, but I'm here.

That TikTok number is a stand-in for any metric you want, any social follower count, Spotify monthly listeners, whatever you care about.

His clients don't even type the name. They keep a private Spotify playlist and add tracks to it from bed, and adding to the playlist creates the record in Airtable, fires the automations, pulls the baseline, looks back 90 days, then re-checks every three days from there. What you end up with is a list sorted by velocity, so day over day growth, and the ten-artists-a-day ceiling disappears.

Jesse: That's pretty fucking sick.

The streaming team works off the same releases as everyone else, filtered to what's shipping. Four this week, seven next week. Because it's the same underlying data as the release schedule, a moved release date moves here too, and nobody has to remember to update a second document.

The pitch itself gets written by AI, but not in the useless way. The prompt is a template with live Airtable data injected into it, pulling the artist name, the release title, the release type, and everything on that artist's timeline that month, so tours starting, marketing campaigns kicking off, all of it. The AI writes from the artist's actual situation instead of a blank page. Max has a full video on that piece specifically on his YouTube channel.

Once the pitches are written, you review the week's releases, preview how they'll read as an email, and send. Through a Gmail or Outlook integration, it goes out from your own inbox to, for some of his clients, 42 partners, each with anywhere from one to 100 recipients. It knows the formatting quirks per partner, down to Spotify contacts needing URIs and Apple contacts needing IDs, which are the two platforms' different ways of identifying the same track. That's a full day of copying a template out of a Google Doc, swapping details and addressing recipients, replaced with one click.

Jesse: I never thought that it could do that. That's fucking crazy.

It's so funny that so much of this work is like, oh, if I just knew the context that it did for somebody else doing slightly different work, then I can start doing this type of work with it. The more you know of this, the more it cracks open your mind about what else you can automate.

Max: That's exactly why it's so important that folks begin their journeys now. In a week, your whole mind's gonna be blown, and your thought process expanded about what's possible. Then think about where you're at in two weeks, three weeks, a month, six months, a year.

Every release carries its allocated budget and its spend. Instead of tracking expenses in a side sheet, you log them against the release itself, so a photo shoot styling expense tagged as publicity rolls straight into the publicity total. In the example Max ran, that put publicity at 9,100 against a 10,000 allocation.

From there you go to budget surveillance, tell your boss you need more room for publicity on that release, and bump the allocation. It's higher everywhere the second you change it. One place, one number, nothing to reconcile.

Jesse: This is if there are samples involved, other songwriters, things like that, getting all the administration nice and organized, especially if you have a lot of collaborators on a project.

It's hard to build software for because it's three layers deep. You're tracking role players inside tracks inside releases, and no off-the-shelf project management tool handles that.

Every track carries its own clearance percentage, driven by whether each role attached to it has executed. On the five-track EP Max used, one track was fully cleared but had publishing unattributed, so it flagged. Another had publishing attributed, but the producer and mixer hadn't executed, plus an outstanding sample. As agreements come in, you flip each role to cleared, and the track climbs to 100.

Then the interesting failure mode. With everything cleared, the publishing came out over-allocated, which means somebody's making calls. The main artist drops to 15% to make room for the sample. The producer sits at 40%, and 10 needs to go to another songwriter, so you create a new role and pull that songwriter out of the existing people table. The moment the 10% is assigned, their entire publishing line fills itself in. Their PRO, their IPI number, all of it, because it was already in the database attached to that person.

That's the payoff of structuring it properly. When it comes time to report to your PRO, the MLC and SoundExchange, the data is already correct and exports however you need it.

DISCO is where sync pitching happens, a catalog manager most of the business uses to send music out.

Jesse: It's very good at holding everything from your stems to your previous versions, to your masters, your unmastered mixes, your 24/96 master, your 16/44 master.

The problem is what happens around it. DISCO holds highly structured data, but the moment you step outside it you're back in flat spreadsheets. Pitch ten supervisors in one day and there's nowhere to track any of it: what you sent, who got it, when to follow up, who wrote back interested in one specific cut. DISCO's tools are rich, but they're not built for your particular workflow, so the project management doesn't live anywhere.

The fix is to stop creating tracks in DISCO at all and create them in Airtable instead, then push them across.

A track record in Airtable holds everything DISCO needs. Title, artist, genre, ISRC, which is the unique code identifying a recording, release date, BPM, and your tags. The comments field holds label copy; the block supervisors read to confirm a track is clearable, so that work is done before they ask. Lyrics go in as text. Then a file URL pointing at wherever you host the WAV master on your server, plus artwork.

Then you hit a button that says sync to DISCO and one automation runs, executing a custom script that Max did not write. He sent Claude the DISCO API documentation, told it to write the automation script, and it did. He's non-technical and can't write JavaScript.

The status moves from triggered to sending, to synced. DISCO creates the track, then hands back its URL and its track ID, and both get written into the Airtable record. That last part is the whole thing, because once that ID lives in your base, anything you do in Airtable can reach into DISCO, adding a track to a playlist, sending it to a supervisor. That's the connective tissue, and it's why you create the record in one environment and sync it rather than building it in both.

The automation has two paths. No track ID means create it. An existing track ID means update it. So editing the label copy in Airtable and hitting sync again pushes the change straight into DISCO.

Max built this from an empty base during the interview, refreshing his live DISCO account first to show the single track sitting in it. No smoke and mirrors, as he put it.

Max: Extremely powerful stuff, and all of it is within reach as a non-technical person. I highly, highly advise getting on your Airtable journey. Feel free to reach out if you get stuck. The comments on our YouTube channel are a great place to ask questions and I'm happy to help.

Max: The website is relationl.co. I'm Max Bernstein on LinkedIn and quite active there. Say you came from here.

Jesse: If you want a first move, don't try to build a label operating system on day one. Build three tables, artists, releases and tracks, and connect them with linked record fields, because that one field type is the concept everything else in this piece is built on top of. Put your real catalog in it, then build one interface on top so you're looking at something that isn't a spreadsheet.

That's a weekend, and the ceiling above it is software that used to cost millions of dollars. I'm on a documentary right now so I've got a few months before I can go deeper on this myself, which is a shame, because he just blew my brain open.