UnitedMasters - Creator tools for artists to get smart, get fans, get paid

Hey PH, Thanks for taking a look at UnitedMasters. It's been a labor of love from our team to connect with one of the most challenging problems that face artists: figuring out how to take how their fans engage with their music across platforms and turning it into ways to grow their business. Today's v1 is focused on introducing action cards: a way for artists to understand how their fans are behaving across free streaming services + social media and what they can do to grow their fanbase. We'd love your feedback and are happy to answer questions!

Woah, thanks for sharing. There's a lot here to digest. Congratulations to your team for making an impactful announcement of your service. When it comes to music and technology, I tend to lean towards caution but invite experimentation. We haven't found the "answer" per say but I do think we have an understanding of most of the problems. Let's take a look at how your solution positions itself and which of those problems you might be covering. Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like your product pulls 3rd party data about fan activity and crunches it into actionable metrics? These metrics are also backed by some form of marketing expertise? This is interesting but also tricky. There's a lot of folks like Next Big Sound providing a similar "big view" music analytics service but I can't say I've personally seen very many artists actually dig into their data. In general, I'm a bit of a skeptic about over investing in the data of 3rd parties and feel like it's the opposite of "owning my future" as an artist. Owning my future means owning my ability to directly communicate with my fans. 3rd party sites are making it increasingly difficult to actually send messages to the mass of fans artists helped bring to the social service in the first place. In general, there should always be a balance between 3rd party services and direct to consumer initiatives like email and text. When it comes to 3rd party services, use everyone, trust no one. In addition, feeding artists suggestions on what might work takes a certain level of finesse if you're trying to build an actual working relationship with that client. If I say a statement like, "Oh, just boost your posts," I don't think I'd get very far as a music marketer. Haha. What I tend to say these days is don't count on a single marketing initiative and lean towards marketing yourself beyond your core fanbase. Make yourself accessible via open ended conceptual marketing and invite in the masses. A website that only plays a song if you show your webcam a banana works for all users who have a banana, not just your fans. This is important. 🍌 Providing marketing tips at scale is difficult but I'd love to hear how you guys think you might handle that. The future has no labels? Okay. You know what has labels? The present. Take note of how every music technology company struggled in their pursuit of sustainability when going against the infrastructure. I should know, I worked at SoundCloud. I don't think you need an official relationship with the record labels to pull your idea off but know this: some of the smartest music and technology folks work for these labels. I'm talking legendary thinkers and passionate music people. They just so happen to work at a label. Any company in this sector would be ludicrous not to invite the wisdom of these individuals who keep the wheels turning and have faced all of the actual problems on a daily basis. One topic that does interest me quite a bit is "intimacy" and "focus" so any tools like "superfan" finder which can help me create a more meaningful relationship or hell, just get someone to pay attention for a moment is okay with me. I'd love to hear what you guys are suggesting artist do with that data.

my career is in data analytics...but music is one of my passions that i actively pursue (I gig and my stuff is up on spotify/soundcloud/etc).

first off..the branding is really cool. kudos on that. i'm guessing this is a team that has good taste and knows how to package art for mass consumption. lots of value in that.

the product is a different story.

I signed up and connected all my social media accounts. 'You have 3.1k fans'...ok so they did some basic math adding up all my followers. now what?

they have these cards that give advice to musicians...any advice i would follow? sure. any advice i didn't already know? you'd have to live under a rock to not know things like twitter and instagram are great ways to 'connect with your fans'.

in my view, the cards don't offer any information an artist couldn't easily figure out themselves with a quick google search.

the dashboard has in interesting design that shows follower trends. again nothing really groundbreaking there.

the fan link feature could have potential. i tried sharing a soundcloud song using their link, it gave me some basic insights like which platforms generated the most clicks...but soundcloud already has that feature.

i'm not writing this product off yet. the team is good, they have some sense of product design, but i think they have a long way to go in terms of delivering something that an indie artist would actually value.

Pros:

cool branding and vision

Cons:

little value to artists...nothing like a record label

This looks awesome. It feels like we're still in the early days of figuring out how music discovery and getting artists paid should work on the internet, and this is the team that can do it. (Google their bios. Impressive as heck.) Like a lot of people who love music, I'm glad that we're heading towards a future in which music labels don't decide what we get to listen to any more. But I also feel like I'm missing a lot of stuff I should know about. (And I try a few new things every year to fix that.) I'm going to be following what UnitedMasters is doing with great interest. @jackk, if there's any way those of us who are just fans can help out or be involved, at some point, I want to hear about it!

Amazing video above; and the Stories video on the site is insane. As a fan I'd be excited if this helps artists succeed.

Looks dope, just logged in with all of our socials. We hope we can use this moving forward. How is it different than Next Big Sound?

Is there plans to add subscription/donation support? Empowering fans to support their favorite artists ala Patreon would turn this into the artist killer app

The website and app has errors once you sign-up and try to login. It's been going on for a few days now.

This got featured on Music Marketing Stack!