Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to Axios Recap, sponsored by JPMorgan Chase.

Today is Thursday, April 1st.

Stocks are up, gas prices are down for the first time in months, and we're focused on a new model

for the music industry.

Yesterday, a company called United Masters announced that it's raised $50 million

in venture capital funding, led by Apple. And that last part is a pretty big deal because Apple

hasn't invested in a startup since 2017. So why United Masters? Because it may be the next major paradigm shift in the music business,

a sort of substack for singers. Now, how music has traditionally worked is that an artist gets

signed to a record label which helps produce and distribute the music. That last part

once involved things like printing and shipping CDs, but now mostly is about pushing digital

files to streaming

services, like Apple Music and Spotify. Either way, the label typically retains ownership of the songs,

an arrangement that got lots of attention in 2019 when Taylor Swift got into a very public

spat with her former record label. The other option is you can just be an

independent artist, and that's a bit easier today than it used to be, thanks to platforms like

TikTok and YouTube, but it's still very hard to get noticed. For example, on an average day,

about 60,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify. So enter United Masters, which not only distributes independent

music to the streamers, but also works to get that music promoted on the platforms, plus via

other avenues like Twitch and ESPN. United Masters takes a 10% revenue cut, but the artist

retains full ownership. The company is led by Steve Stout, a former record label exec,

who also produced albums for such artists as Nas and Mariah Carey. We'll talk to Steve in 15

seconds about his company and the future of music. But first, this. We're joined now by Steve

...