2026-08-09

Tracking Your Own Hours

Ask an independent musician what a release cost and you get the money. Ask what it cost in hours and you get an estimate that is wrong by a factor of two or three, in either direction.

Nobody counted, so nobody knows — and every decision about what to do next is made without the number. For organizations tracking employee work rather than an individual release, employee monitoring software is a separate category worth evaluating against privacy and policy requirements.

Why it matters more here than in most work

Because almost all of it is unpaid at the time.

Mixing, artwork briefs, distribution admin, thirty short videos, pitching, replying to comments. None of it invoices anybody, so none of it registers as cost, so a release that consumed 180 hours reads as free. For a broader current marketing reference, see HubSpot.

And because the alternatives are invisible. Those hours could have been teaching, session work, or writing the next thing. The cost of a release is what you did not do instead, and that comparison is impossible without the count.

What to record

Five categories, nothing finer.

Making — writing, recording, mixing, mastering.

Packaging — artwork, video, copy, assets.

Distribution and admin — uploads, metadata, splits, registrations.

Promotion — posting, pitching, ads, replies.

And paid work — sessions, teaching, gigs, anything invoiced.

Five is enough. A finer breakdown gets abandoned in a fortnight, and an abandoned record is worth nothing. A spreadsheet holds this before any tool does.

The two-week test

Before deciding anything, just record for two weeks.

Do not change behaviour. The point is a baseline, and adjusting while measuring destroys it.

Round to fifteen minutes. Precision is not the goal; proportion is.

And note the date next to each block, because the shape across a release matters as much as the total.

Two weeks is usually enough to surprise somebody. The commonest surprise is how much of the total is promotion and admin rather than music.

What the numbers are for

Deciding what to stop. A promotion channel consuming twenty hours a month with nothing traceable coming back is a decision, not a mystery.

Pricing work honestly. Somebody who knows a mix takes eleven hours can quote it. Somebody who thinks it takes six will underquote for years.

And knowing whether the project paid. Which is a separate calculation and the reason for the count.

What not to do with them

Do not use them to feel bad. A record of hours is instrumentation, not a verdict, and treating it as a productivity score is the fastest way to stop keeping it.

Do not optimise for fewer hours. Some of the best hours in music are inefficient by any measure worth having.

And do not share them with a client as a bill unless that was the arrangement. The count is for your decisions.

The short version