Why I stopped chasing the hit and started chasing profitability

When we crossed a million streams with Shennay, the first thing I felt was that we'd made it. Our tracks were playing in clubs and towns, people were singing them, we were getting calls for events. Artists we knew in Medellín — some who are now genre references — were also in their early days and something was moving in the scene. Everything pointed up. Then reality arrived.

We didn't register the songs that belonged to us. We didn't collect what we should have. We signed what was put in front of us without fully understanding what we were signing. The million streams existed. The money didn't. That experience — which I lived before turning twenty — taught me something no production tutorial covers: talent doesn't protect you if you don't know how to run the business.

Fame as a vanity metric

For years I watched artists chase the hit — that one song that would blow them up — believing everything would get easier from there. Sometimes the hit arrived. But if there was no system behind it — registrations in order, clear contracts, transparent distribution, an actual plan — the hit just created more chaos. More promises that didn't materialize. More money that never reached the people who created it.

If there's one thing I learned building technology for real businesses over the years, it's that no business survives on moments of visibility alone: it runs on systems that work every single day. Music is no different.

Why most artists never see their royalties

When I started working on the distribution side — as Director of Operations at Loro Musical — I understood the scale of the problem from the inside. It wasn't just that artists didn't know how to claim what was theirs: the system itself was full of distortions. Reports that didn't add up, payments arriving late or miscalculated, revenue streams mixed with no coherent logic. The artist didn't know what to expect, and often the distributor didn't have enough clarity either.

I watched this for months and understood something important: it wasn't always a problem of bad intentions. It was a problem of bad systems. The music industry handles enormous volumes of data with tools that simply aren't up to the job. And that cost lands on the artist.

What I decided to do with that information

When I founded Sleem I did it with one clear conviction: independent artists deserve the same tools the major labels have. Real-time transparency over their income, distribution that works correctly from day one, and a team that treats them as what they are — businesses with potential, not catalogues to manage.

This is not about making artists famous. It's about making them profitable. An artist who can live from their music can keep creating; one who depends on virality to survive has no stable future.

The question worth asking

My shift from musician to CEO of a music-tech company was not abandoning music — it was deciding to protect it from a place where I could actually do something useful. I still make music as Cris DAM because I can't help it. But today I work so that what I lived at nineteen doesn't have to happen to anyone else.

If you're an artist or run a label: are you building a system that works when the moment arrives — or just waiting for the moment to solve everything for you?