An artist I know showed me her record deal last year. She had a manager, a label, a distributor. Three separate contracts. Three separate revenue splits. By the time all three had taken their cut, she kept thirty-one percent of what her music earned.
Thirty-one percent. For the person who actually made the thing.
I asked her if she could see a breakdown of where the money went. She could not. The label sent a quarterly PDF with numbers on it, but no underlying data, no per-stream accounting, no way to verify any of it. She trusted the numbers because she had no mechanism not to.
This is not unusual. This is how the music industry works for most artists.
HMD Corporation has four divisions. Technology, Finance, Entertainment, and Commercial. Three of those make obvious sense for a company founded by someone who writes code. The fourth requires some explaining.
The explanation starts with a question I could not stop asking: why does an industry built around creative people treat those people so badly?
Record labels take large percentages of revenue for services that, in 2025, are increasingly automated. Distribution used to require physical manufacturing and logistics. Now it is an API call to Spotify. Marketing used to require industry connections and radio play. Now it is data-driven targeting on social platforms. The infrastructure that once justified high label cuts has been quietly commoditised, but the cuts have not adjusted.
Artists operate in an information asymmetry that would be considered absurd in any other industry. Imagine hiring a financial adviser who refused to show you where your money went. You would switch immediately. Musicians accept this arrangement because the alternative, doing everything yourself, is overwhelming when your actual skill is making music.
HMD Entertainment exists to close that gap.
The division runs across three functions. Record labels that sign and release music with artist-friendly deals: shorter contracts, revenue splits that favour the creator, and full master ownership for the artist. Distribution that handles getting music onto every platform, paired with complete streaming analytics that artists can access themselves. And management services, opt-in and separate from the label deal, for artists who want strategic support.
None of that is revolutionary on its own. Independent labels have existed for decades. Artist-friendly deals are not a new invention. What is different is that all of it sits inside a technology company.
Distribution is automated. An artist delivers a final master and artwork. A single pipeline validates the metadata, formats the files for each platform's specifications, and pushes the release to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and dozens of others. No manual uploads. No one sitting at a computer dragging files into separate dashboards.
Royalty accounting runs on the same financial infrastructure that powers HMD Pay. Payments flow through systems we built, and artists see exactly what they earned, from which platform, in which territory, with which deductions applied. The accounting is real-time and auditable, not a quarterly PDF that nobody can verify.
Marketing uses data analytics built by HMD Developments. When we promote a release, we look at actual streaming numbers and audience demographics rather than relying on someone's instinct about what might work.
Everything the label does is built on technology that already existed inside HMD Corporation. The identity system, the payment infrastructure, the analytics tools. Entertainment applies them to music instead of software. The cost of launching a new label function is low because the foundation was already there.
People assume music and software are completely different industries. They share more than you would expect.
Both are creative products delivered digitally. Both have near-zero marginal distribution costs once the initial work is done. Both require upfront investment (recording time, development time) followed by ongoing promotion and maintenance. Both generate revenue through a combination of direct sales and recurring streams.
The biggest difference is cultural, not structural. Music thinks in "deals" and "talent." Software thinks in "products" and "users." HMD Entertainment sits at the intersection. Music as a product. Artists as partners. Listeners as users whose behaviour generates data that informs decisions.
That framing might sound cold to someone who thinks about music in romantic terms. It probably is. But a romantic industry that leaves artists with thirty-one percent of their own revenue is not something worth preserving out of sentiment.
HMD Entertainment is the youngest of the four divisions and the smallest by revenue. The roster is intentionally small because the economics of the model only work when quality is high and overhead is low.
The goal is not to compete with major labels. It is to prove that a technology-first, artist-friendly approach can work at small scale, and then see what happens at a larger one.
I did not plan to build a record label when I founded HMD Corporation. But the best moves rarely follow a plan. You notice a problem, you see a path towards a solution, and you start building.
That artist I mentioned at the beginning? She is on our roster now. She keeps seventy percent.