Two weeks ago, I flew to Spain to spend time with my mum - not for a holiday, but to learn her business. It wasn’t something I’d ever planned to do. She runs a company that deals with later-in-life planning: funeral arrangements, cremations, repatriations, that kind of thing. The kind of work we all rely on someone else to understand so that we don’t have to.

The logic was simple, if uncomfortable. If anything were to happen to her, I’d have to take over and run the business long enough to sell it. And I couldn’t do that without knowing how it worked. I joked with my therapist beforehand that this was the “Death Trip.”

No one wants to imagine a world without their loved ones in it. But somewhere between the spreadsheets, the service providers, and the conversations about death certificates, I found myself in an unexpectedly human space.

The Day We Walked into the Tanatorio

The first dead body I ever saw wasn’t planned. We’d gone to collect some ashes from a tanatorio - the Spanish equivalent of a funeral home - and there they were, lying quietly in a side room as we walked through.

I expected shock, maybe nausea. Instead, I felt stillness. It didn’t feel grotesque. It didn’t even feel particularly sad. It was, strangely… ordinary.

Part of that might have been timing. Mum and I had been watching a Spanish Netflix series called Muertos, SL (or Death Inc. in English) - a dark comedy about death, the absurd bureaucracy that follows it and the cast of characters that deal with it. It’s equal parts hilarious and morbid, which turned out to be good preparation. By the time I found myself standing a few feet away from mortality itself, it felt oddly familiar, like the last act of a play I already knew the ending to.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the body - it was the business. The systems, the empathy, the choreography of it all. Because for an industry so steeped in death, everything about it felt full of life.

The Business of Death Is Really About the Living

That was the first surprise. My mum’s clients aren’t the dead - they’re the people left behind. The whole structure of her business exists to make life easier for those trying to navigate the aftermath. The legal documents, the cremation schedules, the repatriation logistics - all of it is scaffolding to protect the living from the chaos that follows loss.

And when I thought about it, I realised that’s not far from what the music industry does.

Music is, in a sense, an act of preservation. Artists create something that outlives them. Labels, publishers, and rights administrators - the side of the business I know best - exist to make sure that work continues to matter long after the moment it was made. Both industries are built around the same idea: what remains when the moment has passed.

The death industry deals in legacy, just as the music industry does. Only one talks about it more openly.

Planning for the Inevitable

Death planning is really just legacy management with better paperwork. Most people avoid it until it’s unavoidable - which is usually too late. They don’t want to think about wills, insurance, or funerals because it feels like inviting the inevitable. But the irony is that planning for death is one of the most life-affirming things you can do.

Music publishing is the same. Artists often put off organising their rights or catalogues until they’re in trouble - financially, legally, or emotionally. Nobody wants to confront the idea that their creative life has an expiry date. But if you want your art to outlive you, you have to build the systems for it now.

There’s a quiet dignity to the administrative side of both worlds. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the infrastructure of continuity. My mum might be filling out cremation certificates instead of CWR files, but we’re both dealing with the same questions: Who owns what? Who gets paid? Who decides what happens next?

Both businesses exist because people need help turning something ephemeral - a life, a song - into something structured enough to endure.

The Emotional Economy

Before spending time in my mum’s world, I thought of the “death industry” as clinical - cold efficiency dressed up in polite sympathy. What I actually found was one of the most emotionally intelligent businesses I’ve ever seen.

Every phone call is a story. Every form has a life behind it. Every transaction, no matter how routine, carries a layer of care. The people who do this work don’t just provide services; they hold space for chaos.

And that got me thinking about how we talk about emotion in the music industry. We celebrate emotion when it’s marketable - when it sells records or streams or stories. But when it becomes inconvenient or messy - when it slows things down or demands empathy instead of exploitation - we get uncomfortable.

The death business understands something the music business often forgets: emotion isn’t a byproduct. It’s the product.

The difference is in intent. The funeral director uses emotion as a guide; the label often uses it as leverage. One seeks to heal; the other, to monetise.

And yet, the mechanics are similar. Both industries deal with people at their most vulnerable - one at the end of a life, the other at the height (or collapse) of a dream. Both are built on promises of care, continuity, and remembrance.

The question is whether we honour those promises.

Legacy, Ownership, and Control

In death, the question is who inherits. In music, it’s who controls. The two are versions of the same problem: legacy.

I sat with my mum going through contracts for funeral plans, repatriation insurance, and estate provisions, and realised that they all carry an invisible moral weight. People aren’t just buying a service; they’re buying peace of mind.

In music, catalogues change hands every day - some for hundreds of millions. The rhetoric is similar: we’re told these deals “honour the artist’s legacy.” But often they’re structured around control and cash flow rather than care and continuity.

The death industry doesn’t have that luxury. You can’t fake sincerity when someone’s burying their spouse. The transaction is emotional first, financial second. Maybe that’s what makes it work.

The music business could learn something from that - the idea that stewardship is part of the service. Managing a song catalogue isn’t just about maximising revenue; it’s about protecting meaning.

Because when legacy becomes purely transactional, what’s left to remember?

The Bureaucracy of Compassion & The Myth of Control

There’s something beautiful in the tension between formality and feeling in my mum’s business. Every emotional moment has a form to fill in, a process to follow. It’s not red tape for the sake of it - it’s structure that gives grief somewhere to go.

In the music business, we tend to resent structure. Artists fear contracts, executives dodge processes, and we romanticise chaos as creativity. But structure doesn’t kill emotion; it gives it boundaries. It turns intention into something executable.

A will, after all, is just a contract with mortality. A publishing deal is the same - a contract with posterity. Both are attempts to secure continuity in a world built on impermanence.

The key is what those contracts represent: control or care. The best ones do both.

What struck me, watching my mum’s clients, was that they all came to her for the same reason: to regain a sense of control. Whether they were planning their own funeral or arranging someone else’s, they were looking for certainty in a moment that offers none.

Artists do the same thing when they sign deals. So do executives when they raise capital. Everyone in the music business is chasing control - over rights, over revenue, over narrative. But the truth is, control is an illusion.

Death strips it away. Life, if we’re honest, does too. The only thing we can actually control is how we show up - how we treat people, how we handle what’s left behind.

Maybe that’s why my mum’s business feels so grounded. It’s built on acceptance. There’s no pretending the inevitable isn’t coming, so the work becomes about making the transition bearable. The music business, on the other hand, still acts like it can outrun mortality. We chase youth, virality, and market share as though we’re immortal.

But we’re not. And neither are our catalogues.

The Soundtrack of Aftermath

When a musician dies, streams spike. Catalogues surge in value. Tributes pour in. For a brief window, everyone remembers why that artist mattered. Then the algorithm moves on.

The death industry handles that differently. It doesn’t try to move on; it builds rituals to help people stay connected. It gives memory a home.

That’s what good music does too - it anchors emotion in something we can return to. But the business around it has drifted from that purpose. We’ve turned remembrance into a revenue event.

What if we treated legacy the way the death industry does - as something sacred rather than strategic? What if we measured success not just by quarterly earnings, but by continuity of meaning?

Maybe that’s naïve. But after two weeks surrounded by people who deal with mortality every day, I’m convinced it’s not impossible.

Learning to Look at the End Without Flinching

There’s a calm that comes from working in an industry that deals with the inevitable. You stop pretending that endings are failures. You learn to see them as part of the design.

Music could use more of that mindset. Careers end, trends die, companies collapse. But endings don’t have to be tragic if we prepare for them - if we build systems, communities, and cultures that let people transition gracefully rather than burn out spectacularly.

That’s what succession looks like when it’s done with care.

What Remains

When I left Spain, I realised that my mum’s business isn’t really about death at all. It’s about continuity. It’s about helping people hold onto what matters most - a person, a memory, a sense of meaning - and giving it structure so it can endure.

And if that’s not the core of the music industry, I don’t know what is.

We like to think we’re in the business of discovery, of creation, of what’s next. But at its heart, the music industry is about remembrance. We capture something fleeting and try to make it last. We turn moments into memory.

Death, like music, reminds us that the only things that truly endure are the ones that connect us. Everything else - the contracts, the catalogues, the market share - is temporary.

So yes, I went to Spain to learn how to run a business I hope I never have to take over. But I came back with something I didn’t expect: a clearer understanding of what my own industry is really built on. Not technology. Not rights. Not even talent.

It’s built on the same thing that holds a funeral together: love, memory, and the quiet, persistent hope that what we leave behind will still mean something when we’re gone.