UnitedMasters Founder and CEO Steve Stoute has always aimed to be light-years ahead while in the record business.
At age 28, he worked at Sony Records with Nas and managed Mary J. Blige. At the time, he held the titles of manager and record executive. Later, he transitioned to Interscope Records and worked with artists including Eminem and Enrique Iglesias. He decided to pivot his career to advertising after he realized that industry wasn’t measuring the Black community’s cultural impact. If it were, he argued, companies would be “spending north of half” their budgets on the community, he shared during AFROTECH™ Conference 2026 on Thursday, Nov. 5.
“It was too much staring at me of an opportunity if they thought that was the way to do things, that I could bring innovation of such to that category,” he said from the Main Stage for a session titled “Culture, Capital, and Control,” moderated by Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Chris Lyons. “I started a company, and the name of it was Translation, and I was going to translate culture for Fortune 500 companies. So I left the music business, and I took the instincts that I got from the music business and brought it into the advertising business. And sometimes ignorance is actually the best approach because you don’t have any preconceived notions of what you can’t do.”
One of his earliest moves in advertising, he said, was McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” campaign for which he brought in Pharrell Williams to work on the mnemonic. Stoute helped bridge the gap in how the sector understood and valued culture.
“The word ‘culture’ could now be the most abused term in advertising. You hear it all the time, but when I said that word in 2004, no one even gave it any value. It wasn’t valued, and now it’s the most valued thing,” he said.
Stoute founded the music technology platform UnitedMasters in 2017, which has worked with artists such as Brent Faiyaz, BigXthaPlug, and Tobe Nwigwe. Artists maintain full ownership of their master recording rights. Stoute said he recognized that technology made democratization in the music industry possible, as distribution, marketing, and financial capital no longer had to remain in the hands of companies.
“It was almost blasphemous if an artist asked to own the art … When I started UnitedMasters, what I wanted to do for the first time was give artists a platform so that they could distribute music and own 100% of the music themselves,” he said. “It has been a fantastic journey over the last nine years of building this company, where we have artists who you may not even know, but because they own their art, they’re making seven figures annually because of that ownership. And had it been in the ’90s, they would have sold that art initially for a couple hundred thousand dollars, and they’d be broke today.”
Stoute added, “As a result of what we started at UnitedMasters nine years ago, if any of you guys are in the music business or paying attention to it, the entire industry now is shifting to that model because the major labels, which for years took advantage of the artist by taking ownership, can no longer offer that as a business model because the artists are refusing and they’re saying no.”