#044: UnitedMasters: The Epitome of What’s Wrong with Music Distribution
“Your actions reveal your true motivations” — James Clear
The music industry has a long and troubled track record of companies that appear to be artist friendly, but really end up presenting predatory deals and taking advantage of artists. Historically, this trend has been led by the major record labels. However, in the modern music industry, this is mostly being led by the large music distributors with “label services”. And no company epitomizes this more than Steve Stout’s UnitedMasters.
What is a wolf in sheep’s clothing? A wolf in sheep's clothing means someone who hides malicious intent under the guise of kindliness. This is a perfect representation of what Steve Stout’s UnitedMasters continues to pull on 1.5 million+ artists today. There are still major issues that exist in the major record label system. But these record labels backed by Universal, Sony or Warner still invest heavily into their artists and try to maximize the careers of a large majority of projects that they sign. Does every signing take off to become a global superstar? Of course not. But this isn’t due to fraud or selling a dream. This is due to endless factors, including the artist, management, branding, the music, changes in the music industry and a bit of luck. The larger problems that exist in the music industry today are led by the largest distributors who sell a dream of breaking artists, take 10-15%+ of the revenue and only provide ANY level of support to under 1% of their rosters. This is the equivalent of the modern day snake oil salesman.
Distrokid, Tunecore and CD Baby aren’t the problem. They take a modest fee and provide a quality service to deliver music to Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon Music/etc while passing 100% of the revenue to the artist. They aren’t selling a dream. They are providing a much needed service. It is companies like UnitedMasters, AWAL, Stem, Vydia, ONErpm, Amuse, Ditto & beyond who pretend to service a majority of their rosters, while taking a percentage of the revenues, and not providing ANY services to 99%+ of their rosters who are the problem. Especially when a company like AWAL sells to Sony/The Orchard for $430 million on the backs of those percentage stakes, with none of their artists seeing the upside of that sale.
So why am I singling out UnitedMasters? Steve Stout went on a PR campaign upon the launch of the company talking about how UnitedMasters is artist friendly and how they don’t take any ownership of masters in their deal. What did he leave out? That nearly NONE of the large distributors or even indie labels take master ownership in their deals these days. Additionally, UnitedMasters distributes roughly 1.5 million artists. This is comparison to Vydia (250,000+ artists), AWAL (40,000+ artists) and ONErpm (15,000+ artists). How do you create a staff and structure to support 1.5 million artists? You don’t. It’s impossible. UnitedMasters ends up giving any level of support or pitching/funding services to way under 1% of their roster and sell a dream to the other 99%. And lastly, in June of 2023, UnitedMasters informed their artists that, “on June 15th we updated our DEBUT Plan, where past and future releases will only be delivered to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In the coming weeks, the music distributed on your DEBUT Plan will be taken down from Spotify and Apple Music”. This is a crock of shit and means that not only are they not providing any level of support to a large majority of their roster, but they now are hustling these same artists to upgrade to the more expensive plan in order to not have their music removed from Spotify and Apple Music. This reeks of the old music industry in the worst of ways.
My hope is that more companies emerge who either: 1) provide the core service of distributing music at a modest fee. This is a perfect set-up for an artist who is emerging and just trying to find their footing or a more established artist who has a team around them, but wants to keep full control of the creative path ahead and revenue, or 2) Labels/distributors who have smaller rosters and actually can handle the workload to pitch their artists music to the DSPs, for sync and craft marketing plans to help grow the artists career over time. I started PREACH Records exactly with this in mind. But we don’t pretend to be the savior who is going to clean up the entire music industry. When you come in with that ambition, you quickly grow too big and become the problem. We hope to be one company in a sea of hundreds or thousands of others with a similar mindset. Aside from an inevitable $500 million+ exit ahead for Steve Stout and his investors — at a minimum — UnitedMasters is the epitome of the problem that is rampant in the music industry today.
