Lars Tiger spent 30 years building a name in the music business. He wrote #1 songs, ran a label, and even mentored artists on Idol.
Through all of it, he lived gig to gig, chasing the next session, the next project, the next cash injection.
So he decided to throw it all in, move to the south of France, and start again from zero.
He started releasing music with no name on it at all, under artists he invented. The listeners streaming it have no idea the man behind it exists, and he has never spent a dollar telling them.
That music now pays him $50,000 a month, on two hours of work a week.
How one of Norway’s most credentialed music men ended up hiding from his own audience starts on a farm, with a studio he didn’t want anyone to find.
The Studio He Built In Secret
Lars Tiger grew up on a farm in Norway.
As a kid, he wanted a recording studio, but was afraid his parents would say no if he asked.
So he built one in his great-grandmother’s house and decided to keep it a secret rather than tell them.
That instinct, build it and stay quiet, would take three decades to pay off.
His career gave him everything a musician is supposed to want.
He played jazz piano and engineered records, ran his own label and a publishing company.
He managed, produced and wrote for other artists until some of those songs reached #1 in Norway.
And when Idol needed a mentor for its contestants, they brought in Lars.
By his forties, he’d helped start LIMPI, an international music school in Lillehammer, and the industry that trained him was now sending its next generation to learn from him.
The résumé kept growing, but the bank account never followed it.
Every year the market got noisier, and cutting through cost more effort for less return.
“Being a musician today is brutal,” he said.
So in 2019, he decided to step off the ride.
He moved his family to a farm in Provence, in the south of France, and sat down at the piano with a question that reversed everything his career had taught him.
“What if I did the opposite?”
Forty Tracks Before Lunch
The opposite had a precise meaning.
The playbook he’d followed his whole career said: pour everything into a few songs, polish them until they shine, promote them hard, and hope one breaks through.
Every part of his career had run on that logic, and it kept him broke the whole way.
So he inverted the steps.
Many tracks instead of few. Good enough instead of perfect. No promotion at all. And instead of hoping, he’d let the streaming data tell him what was working.
He reasoned that a hundred smaller tracks earning a little each could beat one big song that might end up earning nothing.
He thought of it like fishing.
Every track was another hook in the water, and he’d rather fish with a thousand hooks than sit polishing a single hook hoping to catch the big one.
The challenge was, that kind of model meant shipping things that were less than perfect. For someone with his name, if he shipped work that was 80% of his best, everyone would judge the missing 20%.
So the name came off.
Under invented artists, a track owed nobody anything, and he could release it the moment it was good enough.
It also kept the experiment honest.
If nameless music earned, it earned on its own, with no old contacts pressing play out of loyalty.
The first test was around 1,000 tracks, uploaded under those invented names, with no marketing behind them.
The production method came straight from his jazz years.
He’d sit at the piano and improvise, recording 40 to 50 tracks in a single session.
Add reverb, package them up, upload.
The last 20% of polish was the part that used to eat his life, and he simply stopped doing it.
Then he watched how the platforms responded.
The answer came back fast.
Listeners searching for piano to study to, sleep to, or read to didn’t check who made it.
The streams arrived without a single person knowing whose hands were on the keys.
Through the Covid years he kept going until the catalog passed 25,000 tracks.
After analysing which of those the platforms ignored, he deleted nearly 8,000 of them and kept the 15,000 or so that earned.
Spotify, the platform his whole industry obsesses over, paid him 15 to 20 cents of every dollar.
Apple Music paid roughly half, and the rest arrived from hundreds of smaller platforms, many across Asia, that most musicians never think about.
By 2025, the catalog had earned more than $1 million.
Then a second business grew on top of it.
His website offers a free five-day course on building a music catalog.
A book, How to Build a Profitable Music Catalog, also sells on Amazon for $37.
Above the book sits Catalog Lab, his flagship course, listed at $397 self-paced or $997 with a year of community and live calls.
And he runs all of it alone.
He’d seen what hiring staff does to the numbers: $500K profit on $500K revenue could easily become $450K on $1 million once a team arrives.
He’d spent 30 years feeding businesses that delivered little in return, and he had no intentions of building another one.
Sold as Lars Tiger
Everything Lars sells today, he sells as Lars Tiger.
His name is on the book cover and all over the program that teaches the method. The newsletter arrives signed.
After 30 years, his name now points people toward a system he’s built, one that funds his lifestyle instead of consuming it.
The nameless music catalog makes the money and proves the method works without a big name attached.
The named part of the business – the book and the Catalog Lab program – tells his story and sells the map that shows students how to do it themselves.
Lars describes the catalog as a rental property, generating income for as long as you own it.
Ownership is the key here, because he plans to sell the catalog one day, or leave it to his kids.
The invented artist names help too. Music attached to a famous face is hard to sell without the face.
Tracks under anonymous artists transfer clean, to any buyer, at any time.
Your Version Of The Piano
You probably don’t have a music catalog, but you don’t need one to do what Lars has done. The lessons underneath his business travel well beyond music.
1. If the model is broken, all the fame in the world isn’t going to help you pay the bills.
Lars lived that firsthand, at the highest levels of his industry, with a résumé most musicians would trade anything for.
So before you spend another year building your name, look hard at the model your name is attached to.
Rather than fight the system, Lars studied what was already working inside it.
He knew artists got paid for streaming rights. He knew he could produce at a scale almost nobody else could.
The opportunity for Lars was width rather than depth.
Ask the same question of your own field: where does money already reliably flow, and what could you produce at volume to catch more of it?
2. Stop betting everything on the flagship.
Putting all your hopes, effort, and money into one big polished launch or product is hard going. The odds are against you.
A volume of smaller works, each getting modest uptake, spreads your risk, and at scale it can accumulate into a substantial return.
Leonie Dawson runs this same play with courses. She’s made 140 of them, priced access at $99 a year, and the archive has generated $15 million.
No single course carried that business. The whole portfolio did.
Your version might be small products, templates, or a course catalog built one modest piece at a time.
Price low, ship often, and let the collection do the earning.
3. Keep your name off the asset and you’ve built something you can sell.
Most creators lean on their name and reputation to promote their products, but when they go to exit they find the business is next to impossible to sell.
Lars did what e-commerce sellers do. He put a product on a platform and let the platform distribute it. E-comm, but for songs.
You can’t build your reputation this way, and the work has to stand entirely on its own merits.
But in return, you stay separate from the business, get paid without being known, and own an asset a buyer could take over tomorrow, provided the platform it lives on has longevity.
Look at what you’re building and ask: if your name came off it, would it still sell?
If the answer is no, you’ve built yourself a job (hopefully it’s well-paid).
Lars built a music catalog, and one day he’ll be able to sell that as a real asset or hand it to his kids so they can continue to reap the rewards.