The unfinished business of independence
Putting ownership at the center of Hum Computer—what creators make, what companies know, and what comes next.
BY BALT
In May, a horror film called Obsession opened in theaters. Curry Barker, a young filmmaker who built his audience on YouTube, wrote, directed and edited it, and shot it in about twenty days on a budget the trades put at around $750,000. It has since grossed more than $520 million worldwide.
It's the kind of story that gets told as proof of what an independent creator can do now. But the part I keep thinking about is what happened after the film was made. Focus Features bought it out of the Toronto International Film Festival for a reported $15 million or more. From there it moved through the familiar machinery: distributors, theaters, international partners, each keeping its own books. I don't know what Barker retained or what access he has to the accounting. But once a film is everywhere, who has the complete picture of what it earned?
I spent twelve years inside a version of that system. I joined an independent label and publisher to build its rights software, and over time became COO and then VP of rights and business affairs. Part of that work was brokering catalog sales, sitting between artists and the capital funds buying their work. Before that, I spent a decade designing products for established technology companies and startups just getting off the ground. So I tend to look at an industry and ask what the system is actually doing, not what people say it's doing.
The conversation around independence often comes down to masters. Who owns the recordings. Who gets them back. Those questions matter. But I've watched artists fight hard to own their masters without much of a plan for what comes next. Some would genuinely be better off with a good label than left to manage a catalog with no systems behind them.
What labels understand is that the music isn't the whole asset. There is also the record around it: the metadata, the splits, the agreements, the history of what every song earned, where, and when. Labels use that record to raise capital, to win market share and to sign bigger artists. It's part of what they bring into the room with investors, and part of how a catalog gets priced.
An artist can own the masters and still depend on someone else for the information needed to understand and operate the catalog.
Owning the work is only part of it. You also need to own its record.
Music isn't an isolated case. Schedule I, a game built by a solo developer and released in early access in March 2025, had sold an estimated eight million copies on Steam by May. One person can make something that ends up needing much of the machinery of a company around it.
What interests me about these stories isn't simply how much one person can make. It's how quickly the work can become bigger than the systems they have around it. The tools for creating have become more accessible. The infrastructure for owning, managing and building on what gets created hasn't kept pace.
There's a version of this inside companies too. Think about a six-person design studio, or a family business that has spent thirty years getting good at one thing. Their value isn't limited to the jobs they've finished or the revenue they've collected. It's also in what they've learned: how they price a job, which clients they turn down, why a decision went one way and not another, the workaround someone figured out late one night that never got written down.
Some of that knowledge is what makes a good business hard to copy. A lot of it ends up in someone's head, scattered across different tools, or in software they rent by the month. The business may own what it produces without having much control over the knowledge that makes it work.
The same tension runs through a film, a catalog, a game or a company: the ability to create something valuable has moved faster than the systems for understanding, owning and operating it.
New work. Old systems.
I don't think the answer is for every filmmaker, artist or founder to build a miniature version of the institution they no longer need to work inside. A great label, publisher, studio or operating partner is still worth a lot. Independence shouldn't mean doing everything alone.
But it should mean being able to work with those partners from a position of knowledge. Knowing what you own, what you're giving up, what your work has earned and what choices are available. Keeping a record that survives the relationship, rather than having to reconstruct it every time something changes.
This is the thinking behind Hum Computer.
We build systems for independent ownership, working where new work has outgrown the systems around it.
We're starting with santi, a creative rights agent keeping records alive for artists, songwriters and producers. We care about what it takes for valuable work to sustain itself, and for the people behind it to retain control over its future.
Independence cannot stop at the ability to make something. It has to extend to what happens afterward.