UK-based Absolute Label Services is making Anthology, the business-management platform it has run internally since July 2024, available to the wider independent sector. Absolute calls it a "Music OS": software meant to cover a rights company's data and day-to-day operations as a whole rather than a single task. Cherry Red Records and Blue Raincoat Music, part of Reservoir Media, are the first named customers, and Absolute says the system is already used across its label-services clients, among them The Fuel Music and Management and Wise Music Group.
Anthology links physical and digital distribution with neighbouring-rights registration, marketing, accounts and reporting, stock and suppliers, and invoicing. Across all of it runs Ant, the company's own large language model, which Absolute unveiled with the platform in June 2025 while it was still used only in-house. The company says building the system took five years and a multi-million-pound investment.
Simon Wills, who leads Anthology and is co-managing director of Absolute alongside Henry Semmence, told Music Business Worldwide that many of the worries artists raise about AI, from copyright to the worth of music made by people, are his too, but that the argument over generated songs has pushed other uses out of view. His team aimed the technology at back-office work instead: watching data around the clock, flagging anomalies, and catching royalty problems or commercial openings that staff might miss. He said Ant draws on a music-industry knowledge base Absolute has built up over decades, and that customers keep full control of the data they feed into it.
There are two ways in. Rightsholders with their own staff, systems and licensing deals can run Anthology as a dedicated tenanted environment, while smaller independents that need more support would more likely reach it through a label-services deal with Absolute. Blue Raincoat's chief operating officer Alison Wenham said the modular design let the company start with neighbouring rights, changing how it registers recordings with collecting societies and follows up claims. Cherry Red's Matt Bristow said the label has at times entered the same data on 15 platforms for one release, and may put out 30 releases in a month, so he expects the system to save many hours of work.
Wills presented the launch as part of a broader case that music companies should build their own technology instead of relying on tools that Apple, Spotify, YouTube or TikTok designed around their own businesses. Independents, he said, now negotiate with Google, Meta, streaming services and investment funds that run on live data, and cannot keep working from spreadsheets, PDFs and scattered portals without paying for it eventually.
He compared the moment to the arrival of digital distribution, which took away the majors' advantage of owning physical supply chains. Reaching listeners is no longer the hard part, in his view; running a complicated global business around it is, and putting large-scale operational tools within reach of independents would remove another structural gap. He predicted that artists choosing a partner will increasingly ask how well that company can see what is happening to their music, and argued that handing machine work to software should make the human side of a label count for more. Turning into a tech business, he stressed, leaves Absolute every bit a music company: independents have long found the artists, scenes and genres that the majors later signed or bought, and their weak spot has been infrastructure, not ideas.
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