The unfinished business of independence

In May, a horror film called Obsession opened in theaters. Curry Barker, a young filmmaker who built his audience on YouTube, wrote, directed and edited it, and shot it in about twenty days on a budget the trades put at around $750,000. It has since grossed more than $520 million worldwide.

It's the kind of story that gets told as proof of what an independent creator can do now. But the part I keep thinking about is what happened after the film was made. Focus Features bought it out of the Toronto International Film Festival for a reported $15 million or more, and from there it moved through the familiar machinery: distributors, theaters, international partners, each keeping its own books. I don't know what Barker retained or what access he has to the accounting. But once a film is everywhere, who has the complete picture of what it earned?

I spent twelve years inside that kind of system in music. I joined an independent label and publisher to build its rights software, and over time became COO and then VP of rights and business affairs, which meant brokering catalog sales and sitting between artists on one side and the capital funds buying catalogs on the other. Before music, I spent a decade designing products for established technology companies and startups just getting off the ground. So I tend to look at an industry and ask what the system is actually doing, not what people say it's doing.

What I saw in music doesn't match the story people usually tell. The public conversation is about masters, about who owns the recordings. Plenty of artists fight hard for their masters without much of a plan for what comes next. Honestly, I think some would be better off with a good label than left to manage a catalog with no systems behind them. We put so much emphasis on getting the rights back, and much less on what an artist needs once they have them.

What labels understand is that the music isn't the whole asset. There is also the record around it: the data, the metadata, the splits, the history of what every song earned, where, and when. Labels use that record to raise capital, to win market share and to sign bigger artists. It's what they bring into the room with investors, and it's part of how a catalog gets priced.

Owning the work is only part of it. You also need to own its record.

I left music in May, and the longer I've been out, the more I see versions of the same problem elsewhere. Every company has a record too. It's how they price a job, which clients they turn down, why a decision went one way and not the other, the workaround someone figured out late one night that never got written down. Some of that knowledge is what makes a good business hard to copy. A lot of it ends up in someone's head, or in software they rent by the month.

Other people seem to have a clearer idea of what that knowledge is worth. I see ads constantly from buyers offering real money for company data. It makes me think about a six-person design studio, or a family business that has spent thirty years getting good at one thing. What they’ve learned has value beyond the next job it helps them do.

At the same time, the work itself keeps moving out of the institutions. Schedule I, a game built by a solo developer and released in early access in March 2025, had sold an estimated eight million copies on Steam by May. One person can make something that ends up needing much of the machinery of a company around it. The tools for making the work get a lot of attention. I'm more interested in what happens once the work is out in the world.

I don't think the answer is for every filmmaker, artist or game developer to build a miniature version of the institution they no longer need to work inside. But I do think they need access to the systems those institutions understood the value of: keeping track of the work, accounting for it, knowing what they own and being able to act on that knowledge. That gap is what I mean when I say new work, old systems.

Owning the record doesn't mean walking away from the tools, the platforms or even the institutions. A great label or studio partner is still worth a lot. What I want is to know where the work came from and how it changed, keep that history somewhere I control, decide what gets shared, and be able to take it with me when the relationship changes.

I believe owning the work should mean owning its record. The value of a catalog is not only in the recordings. The value of a company is not only in what it sells. What accumulates through the work—the knowledge, the decisions, the history—is part of what has been built. It should remain under the owner's control.

FOUR/AM designs systems from that position. With Landline, we're applying that belief to company context: something a company should own and govern, and make available to the people and agents it chooses to work with. Using someone else's tools should not mean giving those tools control over the record.

I expect more valuable work to begin with individuals and small teams, outside the institutions that once made it possible. The capability to own and operate that work needs to move outside those institutions too.

Independence cannot stop at the ability to make something. It has to extend to what happens afterward.