Matthias Hartwig co-heads the Data Operations department at Budde Music Publishing in Berlin. His team handles copyright workflows, royalty processing, income tracking, and the kind of data plumbing that modern music publishing runs on. He got into the field through income tracking, knowing nothing about it at the time, but diving quickly into building systems, data pipelines, automations and whatever solved the problem. His working premise: publishing administration is data work, and AI is a useful tool that gives people with business knowledge technical capabilities that were out of reach a few years ago.