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solve your own problems

the most advanced music company in the world will accidentally build products for every industry

the prophecy​

if we decide to continue down this path, we will create the most advanced, effective, generous, lean music company that is incubating general-purpose products for all industries.

this is not a stretch. this is what happens when you solve real problems for real people in a domain you care about. the tools you build to solve those problems turn out to be useful everywhere.

the ramp parallel​

ramp is a financial payments infrastructure company. they did not set out to build an AI enablement platform. they set out to make their own company more productive. they built Glass to solve their own internal problem: 700 employees needed to be upskilled on AI, and the existing tools were not cutting it.

now they have an AI lab. now they are building products that will serve every company, not just fintech. they solved their own problem, and it turned out to be everyone's problem.

music is the same. music is such a real, high-stakes use case (distribution, royalties, audience management, content creation, brand deals, touring logistics, catalog management) that building for it gives you context on what might be useful tools for any industry. every company is an AI company now. if you solve your own problem in AI, you are almost certainly solving a problem for everyone.

why music is the perfect incubation domain​

music artists are the canaries in the coal mine for the creative economy. they face every problem first:

  • distribution complexity. streaming platforms, social media, sync licensing, physical merch, live events. the number of channels is insane and growing.
  • relationship density. managers, agents, labels, publishers, distributors, producers, engineers, brand partners, fans. a single artist has more active professional relationships than most small companies.
  • content velocity. new songs, remixes, social clips, behind-the-scenes, collaborations, live recordings. the content engine never stops.
  • financial fragmentation. royalties from twelve different sources, brand deals, touring revenue, merch, publishing. reconciling it all is a nightmare.
  • small team, massive surface area. most artists operate with 1 to 3 people handling everything. the leverage from AI is enormous.

every one of these problems exists in other industries. real estate, consulting, media, e-commerce, healthcare, education. the tools you build to manage an artist's distribution will inform the tools that manage any business's multi-channel presence. the CRM you build for artist relationships will inform the CRM for any relationship-dense professional.

the imagos advantage​

gary brings the applied AI engineering capacity (through AAS). ron brings the music industry context, the relationships, the cultural architecture, the taste. together, they can see problems that pure technologists miss and build solutions that pure music people cannot.

the philosophy has never been that humans are out of the loop. it is that a smaller number of humans can do a lot more now. everything done for one artist gets documented as playbooks that AI can handle more and more over time. the system compounds. the first artist takes 100 hours. the fifth takes 20. the twentieth runs mostly on the infrastructure built for the first nineteen.

the fire problem​

there is a real tension to acknowledge. when you give someone fire (activate them on a personal agentic OS), they do not immediately know how to use it. they get excited. they start building. they hit walls. and who do they call? you.

right now, gary and ron are the default support system for everyone they activate. that is fine for 5 people. it does not scale to 50. the path forward:

  1. document everything. every question someone asks, every wall they hit, every breakthrough they have becomes a playbook entry. the playbooks compound.
  2. build the community layer. the goal is to get activated artists comfortable enough to support each other. a group chat, a discord, a peer network where "how do I do X" gets answered by someone who figured it out last week.
  3. recognize the management question. if artists start treating gary and ron as their default managers/enablers, that is either a business (monetize it) or a bottleneck (route it to the community). be intentional about which one it becomes.

ron handles the distribution, music strategy, and cultural architecture questions. gary handles the tech, AI infrastructure, and systems questions. together they cover the full surface area. but the leverage comes from turning every answer into a playbook that the next person can self-serve from.

what this means for imagos​

imagos is not building products on a whiteboard. imagos is solving real problems for real artists and discovering, through that process, which solutions are general-purpose. the products emerge from the work. the best product ideas come from people who are in the pain every day, not from people analyzing the pain from the outside.

if we are lazy and effective managers of talent, cultivators of talent, we will organically identify all kinds of things that need to be built to support talent in 2026. and those things will be useful far beyond music.