I've spent years chasing something I can only call “magic”: the moment a product I built just works, and people feel it. Creating that once is hard. Recreating it on purpose, at scale, is a whole different job. What I've found in my work is that this magic rarely dies from a lack of ideas. It dies from what I call "drag, drift and sprawl."
Where the time actually goes
The thing nobody tells you about scale is that the problems may look different on the surface, but are often identical underneath.
A tiny team and a giant organization hit the same wall. It's rarely the work itself. It's the work around the work: finding the right version of a file, chasing the person who knows the answer, reconciling two systems that were supposed to agree. At scale that stops being an annoyance and becomes the main cost of doing anything.
I learned to stop asking what clients wanted to build and start asking where their time actually went. The answer was almost always the same. Most of the day wasn't spent on the thing they were hired to do. It was spent keeping the company running. I started calling that drag.
Another lesson I learned was about trust. When people trust a tool, they stop thinking about it. When they don’t, they build workarounds around the very system that was meant to make things easier: separate notes apps, side channels, someone's memory, and the list goes on. Everyone knows the numbers are a little off, so everyone double-checks, and the double-checking is where the days go. Then, at some point, the checking stops being as thorough as it should be. Complacency sets in, and things drift into purgatory.
The trap of doing everything
Drift is what happens when people stop paying attention. Sprawl is what happens when people pay attention to everything; sprawl is the issue I see everywhere right now. I'm 100% not above it. Shipping has never been cheaper. In my own work, a feature that used to take a quarter can now take an afternoon, and my agents grind through the tedious parts while I sleep. So what do I do? I build more.
I've come to think that's a curse, especially early in your product execution. When you try to do too much, you muddy your story. Every feature you add is a claim about what your product is. Add enough features solving unrelated problems, and the product stops being anything at all. The products that last treat the core issue like something to protect, even when adding more solutions would have been easy.
Music has its own version of this. Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” has many gems but one idea from it stuck with me: take something away until its identity is challenged, then stop. He used this phrase to describe his approach to producing music: the fewer elements in a song, the more room you have to hear the personality of the ones that remain. Subtraction does the heavy lifting. It isn't minimalism for the sake of it. It's finding the part that is the thing, and trusting that part to carry everything else. That's the test we should hold our products to.
Where Legato comes in
I'm not a musician, and I'm not an industry veteran. I'm a product person building in music legal tech, and what struck me is how familiar the problems look. The same three things play out here: drag, drift and sprawl.
From the outside looking in, the only story I ever heard was that labels are gatekeepers and artists are the ones getting squeezed. There's room for improvement in how labels work, and I won't pretend otherwise. We're working to peel back the layers of friction across the back offices of labels. But the more conversations I've had recently, the more I've seen another side of it: the people inside labels are stretched thin. A small indie might be three people juggling registrations, statements, and contracts, when what they signed up for was finding the next great artist.
A major label and a three-person indie face some of the same operational problems. Both have to track who owns what, who's owed what, and whether the numbers line up. The major label may have more people absorbing the pain, but also a larger catalog where mistakes can hide for years. That's drag.
In labels, an unreliable admin system likely shows up as royalties running on workarounds. Spreadsheets get checked against statements, and statements against emails. But eventually the checking slips. Complacency sets in, and money and credit land in purgatory: unmatched, unclaimed, waiting for someone to notice. That's drift.
What we're building
Magic doesn't scale on its own. To scale your product, someone has to protect it: clear the drag, catch the drift, say no to the sprawl. Music admin works the same way. A great song with unclear ownership may never get paid, while a decent one with clean rights can fund a whole career. What happens behind the song decides who gets to keep making music.
At Legato, sprawl is the issue I can control, which is why our initial scope is narrow by design. The hope is to understand the back office. Take the contract-reconciliation work off a label's plate and, not only do you save time, but you change where indie labels spend their resources. This work frees a label’s people to do the work they came to do. Artists get paid correctly, and on time in the future.
Published November 5, 2026.