Warner Music Group runs 59 labels on one agentic system

"In the music industry, everything starts with a spark — a lyric scribbled onto a napkin, a melody hummed into a voice memo at 3 a.m.," says Ariel Levine, Director of Product Strategy and Operations at Warner Music Group.

The high-precision operation that happens after the spark is what her team rebuilt.

Now, when a new artist signs, an agent parses their contract in Airtable in one click. No more manually reviewing each doc to email royalty rates to finance, video commitments to marketing, and licensing approvals to the sync team.

The system behind it is built on Airtable. Which Levine and John Stahel, Lead Solutions Architect, rolled out across all 59 of WMG's labels in under a year. Contracts were only one piece of it. Release details, marketing plans, and sync approvals each lived in their own inboxes and spreadsheets. Now, it’s all automated with Airtable and agents.

With Airtable, Warner Music Group has:

Disconnected data, disconnected work

Before Airtable, a single release meant tracking more than 40 distinct details across more than 10 systems and 15 teams, pieced together from email, texts, WhatsApp, and scattered spreadsheets.

Hours spent tracking metadata and reconciling the same fields across systems were hours not spent scouting the next breakthrough or launching a campaign.

And when something slipped, it hurt artist relations and public perception. "You've probably listened to a track on your favorite streaming service where the title's misspelled, or the wrong audio was uploaded — an earlier cut that wasn't meant to be the final one," says John Stahel. "When these mistakes happen, the artist is the one who's the most upset about it."

One baseline for the whole company

The proof already existed inside the company. In 2023, Atlantic Records UK replaced more than 25 spreadsheets with a single Airtable system running its release calendar, artist roster, and campaign budgets, and adoption spread faster than any tool the label had used before. "If it's not in the Airtable release schedule, it's not happening," says Sam Spencer, EVP at Atlantic Records UK.

WMG Tech partnered with the Atlantic team to take that model global.

Building a unified data layer

The team built a unified system on Airtable that brings roster and release data together as a single relational dataset for every artist at every label.

Two core tables anchor it:

Analytics from hundreds of platforms flow into that shared layer. From that core the team built outward into marketing calendars, streaming-pitch tools, and a ticketing system. Every other record links back to those two tables — a release links its artists, a campaign links its release — so data lands connected instead of copied.

"We needed buy-in from folks on the ground, but also from our CEO and everyone in between," Ariel says, and she took the pitch to office floors and label leaders in New York, Nashville, and LA.

Where humans direct and agents act

With the data in one place, the team wanted more than a database. They wanted an AI-powered engine that could take over the repetitive work of reading contracts, researching artists, and building sync pipelines.

Contract intelligence

John built field agents that read every artist's contract the moment it's uploaded to Airtable. Dozens of them pull out royalty rates, creative-support terms, licensing approvals, and name-and-likeness clauses, some daisy-chained so one agent's output feeds the next.

Details that A&R once sifted out of legalese and emailed around now surface in permissioned interfaces the instant a contract arrives. Only the teams cleared to see royalty terms can see them and A&R gets back to scouting the next signing.

Artist research at roster scale

Other agents research new artists as they join, pulling publications, social, and streaming data into biographies and performance summaries that once took hours to assemble. Every artist arrives with a briefing waiting, and marketers start informed.

Sync-licensing pipelines that build themselves

Automations and field agents scan release schedules and production announcements, then log each upcoming film and show with its producer, distributor, and synopsis. The pipeline stays current on its own. Sync managers spend their hours deciding which opportunities to chase, not documenting them.

Every team sees what they need

The team rolled out more than 70 app interfaces in about 10 months, from LA to Sydney. Core fields stay consistent everywhere, and local teams add their own for regional work. Two-way synced tables keep every territory current, and an improvement, whether a new table, an automation, or an interface, ships to every instance at the same moment.

Each interface is built for its audience. A&R sees contract data, marketing sees release details, sync sees licensing terms. The interfaces stay up to date with live data so the team doesn't have to translate stale reports every time a change is made. "It's not that we ship an interface and never touch it again," John says. "We work with these teams constantly, to find the small changes that drive adoption."

Those permissions are also how WMG governs the whole system. Each label's data stays separate, and sensitive contract terms reach only the teams authorized to see them, scoped by label, role, and data type.

Everyone builds, everything stays governed

Adoption got the same deliberate treatment. The team meets people where they are, builds things they get value from every day, teaches anyone eager to learn, and puts guardrails around all of it. At WMG, AI is treated as part of the standard toolkit.

That approach opens the doors. A community of citizen developers has grown up on the business side, building tools for studio services, purchase-order approvals, and creative briefs inside guardrails the tech team sets.

Builders keep getting faster too; reaching for Omni, Gemini, and Cursor first and office hours second. John recently connected Cursor to Airtable through the API and MCP to manage schemas and migrate data. "Things that would have given builders an absolute headache a year ago are over in minutes now," he says.

A custom dashboard tracks who uses every app week over week and the system recruits for itself. Someone asks a colleague a question and the answer comes back as a link to an Airtable interface. “We just get more requests for Airtable access every week,” John says. “They get sent a link, they go to that link and request access.” The answer is in Airtable.

Capacity without the overhead

Less than a year in, 40% of Warner Music Group is on Airtable, up 20% since January 2026.

Folding dozens of software licenses into Airtable saves hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Ariel measures the win differently. She watches where the team can spend more time with the artists rather than in the data admin. "Actually ideating, brainstorming, thinking about the collaborations, where they should go on tour," she says. "A lot of this transactional work should just happen on its own. That's the goal."

What the music gets back

What drives the work isn't speed or savings. Ariel talks about responsibility to their clients and the craft.

John hears the change in how colleagues talk about the tools. "Having a tool that's become a weekly, even daily, part of so many people's lives at Warner Music Group has made me feel really fulfilled," he says. "I just hear a lot more people saying 'This is great' rather than 'I wish this was better.'"

Ariel sums it up in one line. "We've enabled agents to handle the data and admin, so our people can carry the soul of the music."