Working at UnitedMasters: Culture, Pace and Who Thrives

The Rhythm at 10 Jay Street

UnitedMasters runs on two clocks. Its Brooklyn headquarters operates on marketing timelines, brand deals with ESPN, Diageo, the NFL, while its San Francisco product team ships on engineering sprints. The split org chart, installed after a $70 million Series A from Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, and 21st Century Fox, makes every decision a negotiation between music-industry tempo and tech-platform velocity.

That duality shapes the company's pace, its hiring bar, and which employees thrive or burn out. Sales-heavy staffing feeds brand partnerships, with coasts running on different cadences. Steve Stoute's founder principles, forged in hip-hop's constraint-to-superpower pipeline, set the cultural terms. The review record shows who lasts: mission-driven generalists who build their own scaffolding. Specialists who expect scaffolding to exist leave.

Steve Stoute built his reputation at Interscope Geffen A&M and Sony Music before founding Translation, the creative agency that turned cultural currency into commercial deals for McDonald's and Budweiser. When he launched UnitedMasters in 2017, the premise was explicit: give independent artists major-label distribution without the ownership grab. The company now connects over two million artists to 350-plus streaming storefronts and runs brand partnerships with ESPN, Diageo, Coca-Cola, and the NFL. But the operating model reveals a split personality.

David Reich, hired as president in December 2021, brought a playbook from Uber. He spent five years leading product and growth across sixty countries, then founded Uber Transit. His mandate covers strategy, technology, and operations. The org chart reflects that duality: engineering and product leadership sit in San Francisco, while marketing, legal, and A&R anchor in Brooklyn. Jesse Morav runs A&R. Sasha Safavi heads music licensing and legal. Todd Perry II leads marketing. Ebony Maria Hadley directs digital marketing. Linnea Sundberg has been recognized externally for her work on the business side.

Decision-making follows the money. Brand deals, like the four-city True Religion tour series launching September 2026 across New York, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles, move on marketing timelines. Product releases, including automated marketing campaigns, playlist pitching tools, and the "record label in your pocket" mobile experience, move on engineering sprints. The Brazil expansion, announced March 2025, added tens of thousands of artists and 150-plus partner acts in under a year, with the Sala Vermelha audiovisual series dropping new content every two weeks. That pace requires the Brooklyn and San Francisco teams to synchronize without a shared playbook.

Glassdoor reviews (4.0 out of 5 across 61 submissions) surface the friction. One anonymous review describes A&R selling "whatever dream they can to sign an act" while marketing "can't execute those expectations," creating "cross department animosity" and "disappointment between artist and company." The same review flags nepotism in A&R. Current job postings suggest the company is still building connective tissue between its two coasts:

The median salaried role sits at $170,000 across thirteen listed positions, with a band spanning $85,000 to $262,000.

But the lack of a unified operating cadence shows up in the gaps: reviewers describe marketing timelines that outpace execution, A&R promises that marketing can't fulfill, and a recruiting function that includes a Temporary Recruiter role. The next hire who bridges those rhythms may determine whether the platform scales or stalls.

Values Forged in the Basement

Steve Stoute's personal code runs through UnitedMasters like a current. Resourcefulness, work ethic, doing the job whether it's plumbing or making a movie, and never quitting. He traces it to West Indian parents who arrived in the early 1970s: "For my dad, it was never about how much money you made. It was more about ethics and principles. If you're going to do the job, do it. Do it like it was an opportunity, and that, treat it the same way." That framing shows up in the company's central bargain: artists pay a competitive distribution fee, keep their master rights, and split royalties. The infrastructure exists to serve the artist, not to own them. Stoute put it bluntly in 2017: "It's very important that an artist's job is to be a great artist. The infrastructure around them should be helping them get more money at efficient rates, not owning their masters and taking from them."

The hip-hop origin story doubles as an operating philosophy. When Stoute describes the genre's early days, he's describing a constraint-to-superpower pipeline the company still runs on. No band, no budget, two turntables pressed into service as instruments. "The problem becomes a superpower. So you start making mix tapes and doing other things to move forward because the front door is not available to you. And then the problem becomes a superpower. I don't care what anybody puts in front of me. I've never seen a challenge and thought for a second 'I can't do that.'" That mindset explains why UnitedMasters built its own CRM and retargeting layer instead of leaning on Spotify's artist tools, and why it pursued brand partnerships as a parallel revenue engine for independents. NBA, Bose, Diageo's Cîroc, Twitch, TikTok, FIFA World Cup 2022. Each deal started from a missing front door.

Uncomfortable conversations are institutionalized. Stoute's rule: "You've got to have the uncomfortable conversation. The fact of the matter is that you inherited an uncomfortable topic. So if you don't want to have the uncomfortable conversation because you want to feel comfortable, then you're actually the getaway driver for the problem." That maps directly to how the company approaches hiring and representation. He has called out network-based hiring as a structural proxy for racism: "The point is that you're not hiring outside your network. Unfortunately, if it was just left to people's morals to make these decisions, they wouldn't be made, because I've found that nepotism actually looks like racism... It feels like racism because people who are not part of that immediate network can't get in. And, unfortunately, most people's networks are not diverse." The Translation creative partnership, Stoute's ad agency folded into UnitedMasters as Translation Enterprises, operates as a deliberate cross-pollination engine. Musicians, marketers, engineers, and storytellers from YouTube, SoundCloud, Pandora, Facebook, Dropbox, Complex, and VICE work alongside award-winning creative teams. The mix is the mechanism.

Payment optionality followed the same artist-first logic. When 1.4 million platform artists began asking for crypto payouts, UnitedMasters partnered with Coinbase in 2022 to offer fiat or cryptocurrency. Not as a headline grab but because the request was consistent and loud. "What we kept on saying overwhelmingly was that they wanted the option to get paid in crypto so we decided we had to find the best partner to do it," Stoute told CNBC. The iOS app (launched 2019) lets artists distribute from text messages, Dropbox, or iCloud while viewing streaming stats, playlisting, earnings, and brand opportunities on mobile. Desktop and mobile parity is intentional: independence means access anywhere.

The "movement" language Stoute uses sets a high bar for alignment. "This becomes a movement only if everybody moves at the same time. It has to be broad, including different industries seeing it as a priority. If it is just your company, it would just be a moment." It also explains the company's partnership velocity: NBA (2018), iHeartRadio/AT&T "Come Up Show" (2019), NBA 2K20 (2019), Cash App "Cash for Change" (2020), TikTok Commercial Music Library (2020), Twitch (2020), 1789/Sarz for Africa (2023), Nine+ Records/Davido (2024). Each extends the data layer into a new cultural corridor. The through-line is consistent: build the missing infrastructure, let the artist keep the rights, and measure success by whether the artist converts listeners into revenue they control.

What the Hiring Bar Selects For

UnitedMasters screens for tenacity first. David Melhado, head of artist partnerships, put it plainly in May 2024: "Someone who brings a lot of tenacity. In an independent landscape you have to be entrepreneurial-minded so that is one of our core values." The phrase "independent landscape" does double duty. It describes both the artists the platform serves and the operating mode the company expects from employees. Candidates who have built something from zero, or operated without a safety net, signal the right orientation.

That entrepreneurial bent connects directly to the founder's philosophy. Stoute has said repeatedly since 2018 that artists should "sign to themselves" and own their futures. He extends the same logic to hiring: the company looks for people who treat their role like a founder would. Owning outcomes, not executing tickets. A 2024 Billboard interview with A&R and marketing leadership revealed the internal language: "We needed to put a team together that was wholly committed towards building something brick by brick from the ground up... not in the pursuit of a hit record, but the pursuit of building an artist that has a foundation." The hiring bar rewards evidence of long-horizon thinking over campaign-cycle wins.

"The team we would use in Germany for an Ekkstacy record would not be the same team that we should use for BigXThaPlug or FloyyMenor. So we're able to just bring in the independent partners within those specific regions that work directly for that specific artist."

That quote, from the same Billboard piece, exposes a second filter: contextual adaptability. UnitedMasters operates across LATAM, Canada, UK, and Africa with a roster that includes artists who grew from 500 to 14 million monthly listeners (BigXthaPlug) and held the number one spot on the Billboard Latin chart for six weeks (Floyymenor). The company does not run a single playbook. It hires people who can assemble the right regional partners, work across local culture, and pivot tactics per artist. Candidates with international market experience, especially in emerging music economies, surface faster.

Technical and commercial roles both face a data-and-strategy screen. One Glassdoor interview account from a candidate for a data-focused role described a 15-minute hiring-manager call that probed "experience around formulating data and analytics strategy at startups, managing risk, hiring." Four weeks of silence followed, then a 30-minute on-site. The process averages 23.56 days across 15 reported interviews. Slower than a typical startup, faster than enterprise. The delay suggests deliberation, not disorganization. The company wants to see how candidates handle ambiguity and whether they can articulate a strategy without a template.

Startup scars count. The same interview account noted the hiring manager asked explicitly about "managing risk, hiring" at early-stage companies. UnitedMasters sits in a hybrid zone: it has nearly two million artists on the platform, NBA and brand partnerships embedded since day one, and a valuation that supports senior engineering bands of $275K–$310K (VP Engineering) and $195K–$230K (Staff Product Manager) per the Zero G Talent board. But it still builds product for a fragmented, fast-moving creator economy. People who have only operated in mature, process-heavy orgs rarely clear the bar.

Diversity is not a checkbox. It's a commercial requirement. Melhado said the company believes "having a diverse team unlocks potential and it gives us a unique advantage when it comes to relatability to our artists." With artists from four continents on the partner roster and a localized mobile app in multiple territories, cultural fluency is a hiring criterion, not a nice-to-have. Candidates who can demonstrate direct work with global creator communities, or who come from those communities themselves, carry an edge.

Brand partnership DNA matters. "Working with brands has been embedded in the DNA of UnitedMasters from the beginning," the leadership team told Billboard. The NBA deal, the NBA 2K soundtrack, the XFL theme song for BigXthaPlug are not marketing afterthoughts. They are revenue architecture. Roles in marketing, business development, and product all weigh sync and brand deal experience heavily. A candidate who has structured a multi-territory brand integration for an independent artist speaks the company's language.

The compensation signals reinforce the profile. The board shows a salary band of $85K–$262K (median $170K) across 13 salaried roles, with equity and 401(k) match standard. Senior engineers can see $200K–$350K at comparable enterprise companies, per Scoutify. UnitedMasters pays competitively but not at the top of the Big Tech band. That filters for people who value ownership and mission alignment over pure cash maximization, exactly the "independent" mindset Stoute champions.

Inside the Review Record

Employee reviews on Blind and Glassdoor paint a split picture. High marks for work-life balance, low marks for management, and a mission that resonates even with critics. Blind shows an overall 3.4 out of 5 from five verified reviews as of May 2025. Glassdoor aggregates 65 reviews into a 3.0 overall. Only 43 percent of Glassdoor respondents would recommend the company to a friend.

Work-life balance is the clear bright spot. Blind reviewers rate it 4.2 out of 5, the highest single category. A February 2024 reviewer wrote, "Great team and great wlb. A lot of ex twitter employees holed up here." A March 2022 review noted "Unlimited PTO, fully remote (if you're into that)" and said management was "pretty open about everything." A July 2024 reviewer simply wrote "Love the company none at the moment to be honest."

Management scores the lowest on Blind at 2.6. A May 2025 review called it "Terrible company culture and leadership. Fear based decisions. Highly dysfunctional." A September 2024 reviewer listed "Poor company culture. They lead with fear. High turnover and gaps in Executive leadership. No clear strategy or transparency. Under resourced." A February 2024 review said, "Management has no clue how to scale and constant turnover and layoffs." The March 2022 review that praised transparency also warned, "Compensation. They don't compensate appropriately. Will be stingy with raises whether for CLA or performance or even for promotions."

Compensation sits in the middle. Blind shows 3.2 for compensation and benefits; Glassdoor reports 3.7. The March 2022 Blind review summed it up: "Good WLB, but poor compensation." First-party board data from Zero G Talent lists recent postings with bands like VP Engineering at $275k–$310k, VP Marketing at $225k–$265k, and a Staff Product Manager at $195k–$230k. Senior roles that suggest competitive top-end pay but leave mid-level clarity thin.

The mission draws consistent praise. "Supporting artists is by far the best part of the company mission," a May 2025 Blind reviewer wrote. A September 2024 review cited "Strong philosophy to empower artists. Many opportunities to take on new things and grow career. The people they hire are entrepreneurial." A Glassdoor reviewer noted the company "actively encourage[s] experimentation and support[s] trying fresh methods to stay ahead of the curve."

Startup identity confusion recurs. A Glassdoor reviewer wrote, "I was told this was a start-up, but I have worked at start-ups, and they don't have 100+ employees. It's a disorganized disaster trying to do too much without the foundation to support it. I was the first in a new job position and not a single person could tell me what I was supposed to be doing." A February 2024 Blind review echoed: "Good company but lacks direction."

Career growth rates 3.6 on Blind — average. The September 2024 review that criticized leadership also acknowledged "Many opportunities to take on new things and grow career." Company culture sits at 2.8 on Blind, dragged down by the management and strategy complaints.

People who thrive tend to share three traits. First, they connect viscerally to the artist mission. That sense of purpose carries them through structural chaos. Second, they operate like founders. "The people they hire are entrepreneurial," noted a September 2024 Blind post, and the same review notes the same opportunities. Third, they value autonomy over structure. Unlimited PTO, fully remote eligibility, and "management is pretty open about everything" attract ex-big-tech refugees who already know how to self-direct.

The burnout profile is the mirror image. Fear-based leadership appears repeatedly: "They lead with fear," and the same dysfunctional culture. Employees who need clear strategy, transparent communication, or stable executive sponsorship struggle. "No clear strategy or transparency," the same turnover and gaps, "constant turnover and layoffs." Compensation expectations also trip people: "they don't compensate appropriately…" and the same stinginess. The board's salary bands show wide variance that can feel arbitrary without transparent bands. Resource constraints compound the pressure: "under resourced" and the same disaster describe an environment where high performers carry disproportionate load until they leave.

The pattern is consistent across review vintages from 2022 to 2025. UnitedMasters rewards such individuals. It punishes such people.

At 10 Jay Street, the Manhattan Bridge still catches the morning light. But the rhythm inside hasn't settled. It's still the sound of two clocks trying to strike the same second. The next hire who bridges them won't just fill a role. They'll decide whether the platform becomes the infrastructure Stoute promised, or another missed front door.

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