The music industry is seeing a massive shift from large record-label infrastructure to smaller, faster-moving teams managing artists, releases, and workflows independently.
But while music creation and distribution have evolved quickly, the operational side of the industry is still fragmented across various portals.
Patchbay is building the software that powers the behind-the-scenes work of the music business — the contracts, royalties, metadata, and admin work that listeners never see.
The problem is that none of the portals holding this data were built to work together. So instead of spending years building and maintaining integrations themselves, Patchbay used Deck to connect those systems and stay focused on building the workflows their customers actually care about.
"Patchbay is the first true collaborative service where different people, in different roles can do the same work. We're the place to handle the contracts, the songs, and the releases — all in one place."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
For Patchbay, Deck provides the agents and authentication capabilities that power workflows across the fragmented music systems that the industry runs on — turning portals with no APIs into a reliable data layer that feeds directly into the product.
The problem? The music industry is built on fragmented data and no APIs
For Patchbay, these disconnected systems created a real operational problem. The company is building a shared workspace where teams can manage everything from one place. But before they could deliver that experience, they needed a reliable way to pull data from the portals that the music industry actually runs on — PROs, CMOs, label royalty portals, and publisher royalty portals.
The challenge is that most of these portals were never built to share data. There are no common APIs, and there is no real incentive to build them. And because every artist works with a different mix of labels, publishers, and rights organizations, the number of portals a team has to manage only grows over time. A manager with ten artists on their roster could be dealing with a completely different set of portals for each one — each requiring its own login and each returning data in its own format.
"There's no common APIs. There isn't really a commercial reason oftentimes for a lot of those companies to build great portals or integrations."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
Music moves fast. But the infrastructure behind the business has not kept up.
Deck handled data retrieval workflows at scale so Patchbay didn't have to
Patchbay integrated Deck directly into their product to handle portal logins and data retrieval across the systems that power the music industry. Rather than building and maintaining that infrastructure themselves, they handed it off entirely to Deck.
Within weeks the team had live data flowing directly into customer workspaces — and could finally focus their time on the product work that actually mattered.
"When we found Deck, we knew that it would be a good fit because that would eliminate thousands of hours of our time, massive capital investment, and really not a lot of return because we would be building rather than putting all our time and effort into our user experience."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
With the data layer in Deck's hands, Patchbay can stop thinking about infrastructure entirely and focus on what they're building — and their vision for what comes next goes well beyond data retrieval.
Preparing for fully automated operations
Patchbay sees automation as much bigger than data aggregation.
The company is now building toward workflows that can actually complete operational tasks for users automatically. That includes workflows like:
- Registering songs
- Updating royalty information
- Managing billing details
- Completing operational tasks across portals
The long-term vision is to remove repetitive admin work from the music business entirely.
"There's a big differentiator between companies that see the world to come and companies that are kind of building for a moment or a hype cycle. We saw Deck as a business that knew the work that it needed to do in the short term, but also saw the future that was coming, which is that agents and browser use are becoming more important."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
How Deck powers Patchbay behind the scenes
When a user creates a workspace in Patchbay for a new client, they connect their data sources. Deck handles the portal connectivity in the background. Patchbay then combines that data with contract inputs and surfaces the most important actions for each music executive — missing registrations, unpaid invoices, royalty issues, metadata problems.
"From there, everything runs in the background. We pull in information automatically."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
Patchbay is now moving into write actions — agents that complete operational tasks inside portals on behalf of artists and managers. The long-term goal is simple.
"My hope is that because of us, a music executive or creative never logs into a portal again."
Aidan Schechter, Co-Founder and CEO of Patchbay
For a small development team, staying focused on product instead of infrastructure is critical. Using Deck meant the company didn't have to spend engineering time maintaining scrapers, browser sessions, and portal integrations. That let the team spend its time building operational software specifically for the music industry.
Results
- Faster product development
- High hundreds of engineering hours saved
- Multiple six figures avoided in infrastructure costs
- Faster rollout of new operational workflows
With Deck handling authentication and data retrieval workflows behind the scenes, Patchbay can focus on building that future faster.