Once again, indie artist services and distribution platform UnitedMasters is bringing down the cost of doing business for musical artists.
In 2020, it launched a $5-per-month subscription tier that allowed artists to keep 100% of their royalties (the platform had previously kept 10% of artists’ royalties from all distributed platforms).
Now, the New York-headquartered platform is rolling out a new subscription tier that still allows artists to keep all their royalties, but the new tier, dubbed DEBUT+, costs just $19.99 per year (i.e. about $1.67 per month).
On Tuesday (August 13), UnitedMasters confirmed the DEBUT+ tier is now available immediately in “priority markets” including the US, UK, Canada, Nigeria and Brazil.
“Making it in music has never been more possible for independent artists, but it still requires the right partner. UnitedMasters presents the most compelling offering for independent artists in any genre at every stage of their careers,” Founder and CEO Steve Stoute said.
“With DEBUT+ and the Make Your Debut Challenge, we’re welcoming the next wave of independent artists into our ecosystem and empowering them with the technology, education, and growth opportunities to launch sustainable careers on their own terms.”
The “Make Your Debut Challenge” is a contest UnitedMasters is launching to coincide with the launch of the new tier, in which US-based artists who use the platform can submit tracks to compete for a $250,000 prize, an artist partner deal with A&R and marketing funds, a development and marketing plan, and a performance spot at this year’s New York SelectCon, a music conference run by UnitedMasters.
Competing artists must be based in the US, be DEBUT+ or SELECT members, and must release a track via UnitedMasters after June 1, 2024, and post it to Instagram or TikTok with the @unitedmasters tag and a #debutcontest hashtag.
UnitedMasters offers artists distribution on more than 50 platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and Instagram, as well as unlimited music releases that go live within five days, streaming analytics and reporting, and access to educational resources and personalized coaching, among other features.
“Making it in music has never been more possible for independent artists, but it still requires the right partner.”
Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters
The platform boasts of its role in bringing to prominence such artists as FloyyMenor, Tobe Nwigwe, Earthgang and BigXThaPlug. It counts more than 2 million indie artists on its platform, and says it can connect artists to such major brands as ESPN, Diageo, and Pepsi.
The platform has raised capital through a series of funding rounds, beginning in 2017 with a $70 million investment round that included Google parent Alphabet, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and 20th Century Fox. A subsequent funding round in 2021 valued the company at $550 million.
In that time, UnitedMasters has been busy building out its offering to artists, launching a mobile app in 2019; inking a deal with TikTok that enables artists distribute their music from within the TikTok app; launching a beat marketplace; and partnering with music financing platform beatBread to offer artists advances of up to $1 million.
Over the past year, UnitedMasters struck a partnership with Nigerian producer Sarz to “unlock new opportunities for African artists,” partnered with AI-powered marketing platform SymphonyOS to provide artists with automated music marketing tools, and launched a personalized in-app artist development feature called “Blueprint.”
It also invested in Udio, one of the two AI instant music generating platforms currently being sued by major recording companies for allegedly using copyrighted music without permission to train their AI models.
While the reduced cost of UnitedMasters’ services may be a reflection of an increasingly crowded marketplace for indie distribution and artist services platforms, it may also be a reflection of Stoute’s philosophy on the direction in which the music business is headed.
In a 2021 interview with MBW, Stoute predicted that record companies’ “ownership in artists’ intellectual property will diminish.”
“Big companies going forward will just be managers of catalog. I don’t see the need for a record company [beyond that] to exist,” he said.
“If record companies just try to maintain the model that they have now, where they buy artists rights in the beginning of their career in order to own their intellectual property, then I think they will just be managing the intellectual property that they’ve already obtained and garnered over the last 50 years.”Music Business Worldwide