One of the toughest shifts for me, when I moved from catalog to front-line releases in 2009, was how often label copy didn’t have confirmed writer and publisher information at time of release. We’d still be wrangling splits and confirming ownership months after the release was out the door. The identifiers get backfilled once things trickle in. The industry has gotten into the habit of treating delivery as the start of the paperwork rather than the finish line, and the systems around us mostly let us get away with it.

The thing with puzzles is that you can’t just grab pieces from the pile and start putting them together, and a single puzzle piece in isolation won’t show you the whole picture. Similarly, without a data strategy, it’s hard to see the complete picture and how each piece can be leveraged effectively as part of the whole.