2026-08-09

Software That Helps

No product is named on this page. Categories change slowly; product lines do not, and a list of names would be exactly the kind of thing that expires. For a related workplace reference on online timesheets, see further details.

What follows is what each kind of tool can actually establish and where it stops.

Five categories

Time tracking. Records where hours went. Can establish: the split between making, promotion and admin. Cannot: tell you whether the hours were well spent.

Analytics dashboards, platform-supplied. Can: saves, repeats, completion, geography, playlist adds. Cannot: connect any of it to money, or to anything happening off-platform. For additional current music-industry context, see Rate Your Music.

Link management and smart links. One address that routes to every service. Can: click counts per destination, and a single link that outlives a distributor change. Cannot: tell you what happened after the click.

Distribution and catalogue tools. Uploads, metadata, splits, royalty statements. Can: what you were actually paid, which is the only authoritative income figure you get. Cannot: attribute it to a campaign.

And spreadsheets, which are the category most people should start in and the one no vendor recommends.

What no tool does

Attribute income to effort. No product connects a shirt sale to the video that caused it, and none will, because the causal chain crosses systems nobody controls.

Which means the calculation that matters is manual — income, spending and hours, assembled by you, once per release.

Judge whether the music is working. Dashboards measure response to what you did; they cannot separate a weak campaign from a weak track. A low completion rate across every audience is the exception, and reading it requires you rather than the tool.

And survive your leaving. Data inside a tool is inside a tool, and the export question applies here as everywhere.

What to ask of any of them

What comes out? Export format, and whether the history leaves with you.

What is on the tier above? API access and full history are common boundaries.

Who else sees the data? For catalogue and royalty tools this matters more than for most.

And what happens to old data? Some platforms retain a rolling window rather than everything.

The order to adopt in

Spreadsheet first, for at least three releases. It costs nothing, it forces you to decide what is worth recording, and most people discover they need less than they assumed.

Then a time tracker, if the hours question is live and the spreadsheet is not being kept.

Then anything else, only when a specific repeated task is consuming time a tool would remove.

Buying tools before knowing what you measure produces a subscription and a habit of not looking at it, which is the common outcome.

The short version