BIZARRO FILM PROVES UNTITLEDINBRACKETS IS THE STUDIO IN YOUR POCKET

## The Car, the Sand, and the App That Made Both Worth It Somewhere in a studio, there is a car. There is also 1,500 pounds of sand. Both arrived because of a phone app. That is the sentence that explains everything you need to know about where music technology is headed in 2026. DCA, the artist behind the short film *BIZARRO*, did not make a commercial. He made an act of belief, a full-scale cinematic production directed by himself, scored by himself, edited by himself, and built around a single piece of software: [untitled], the app from Brooklyn-based startup untitledinbrackets. The film's cast includes guitarist Melanie Faye, keyboardist John Carroll Kirby, and a crew list that runs to fourteen names including director of photography Jackson Sjogren and colorist Alex Winker. This is not the behavior of someone reviewing an app. This is the behavior of someone who found the thing that finally works. The question is why [untitled] earned that level of devotion, and the answer is more interesting than the film. ## 32,000 Artists Were Using Notes App Before This [untitled] launched publicly on August 2, 2023, built by childhood friends Dan Lilienthal and José Chayet. Five and a half years before the public launch, the two focused on building the best place for artists to store, listen to, share, and organize their work-in-progress music, because before they existed, creators used everything from the Notes app to Dropbox to iMessage, apps not built for music. That diagnosis was correct. And the market confirmed it fast. As of December 2025, [untitled] boasts 300,000 monthly users, triple the amount from one year prior, including artists like Hayley Williams, PinkPantheress, and Geese, with some 34,000 customers opting to pay $49.99 a year for an editing suite, unlimited storage, and extra privacy features. Triple. In one year. That is not organic growth. That is word spreading through studios the way a good plug spreads through a session. In 2025, [untitled] added an Android app and a desktop version for MacOS; a new editing suite contains in-app tools like stem splitting, pitch shifting, and section looping; and a feature launched in October lets paying subscribers convert their projects to vinyl. Pitch shifting and section looping. The exact features DCA called out as the reason *BIZARRO* exists. The features that, in his words, change everything. He is not wrong. ## Fast Company Named It. Andreessen Horowitz Funded It. Artists Believe It. Built by two childhood friends and self-described design nerds, [untitled] is an elegant solution to a messy musical workflow. Fast Company put it on its Most Innovative Companies list for 2026. That recognition matters less than the other vote of confidence: the company raised $4.6 million led by General Catalyst to help music artists nurture and maximize their creative process. Then Andreessen Horowitz led a Series A. [untitled] founders Dan Lilienthal and José Chayet are the epitome of founder-market fit: they've known each other since birth, grew up inspired by their older brothers who made music, and make music on their iPhones themselves, giving them a deep appreciation for the creative workflow that resulted in a product musicians find intuitive and delightful. Founder-market fit is the single most important variable in whether a product survives. Lilienthal and Chayet are not building for musicians from the outside. They are musicians building for themselves, which is the only way this kind of software gets the details right. The details matter enormously here. The ingenuity of the app lies in its functionality as a creative workflow tool disguised as a music player; users can upload tracks from multiple sources, organise them into projects and folders and sync seamlessly across devices; unlike traditional platforms, it allows artists to iterate, updating versions, adding notes and collaborating in real time. Iteration. That is the word. Not storage. Not playback. Iteration. The ability to move a half-formed idea from the studio to the street to the phone and back without losing fidelity or momentum. That is what every musician actually needed and nobody built until now. ## The Vinyl Move Nobody Saw Coming Here is where [untitled] goes from interesting to genuinely strange, in the best possible way. Artists can now order vinyls of their projects directly through the app, and [untitled] does not take a cut from vinyl sales. The prices come straight from Citizen Vinyl, a pro pressing plant. Think about the logic of that for a moment. An app built to store demos is now pressing those demos into physical records at cost, taking nothing. In 2026, when every platform is optimizing for margin and every streaming service is compressing artist revenue into fractions of cents, [untitled] is doing the opposite. It is pricing itself out of the vinyl transaction entirely. That is not altruism. That is positioning. José Chayet has been explicit: "We're not here saying, 'Oh my God, there's no money in music, we are going to save the musicians.' That's a negative standpoint. If you start there, you're thinking about marketing, not the product. We are product-obsessed individuals." The vinyl feature is a product decision, not a PR one. It keeps artists inside the [untitled] ecosystem from demo to physical release without making them feel taxed at every step. Compare that to BandLab, which has 100 million users and spent 2025 converting its free tools into paywalled features while flooding the interface with ads. The contrast is not subtle. ## January 14, 2026: The Day the Business Model Shifted On January 14, 2026, [untitled] unveiled direct sales: paid subscribers, the 32,000 artists, producers, and musicians using the app, now have the ability to offer music directly to their fans, whether unreleased demos, stems, full songs, or entire projects, at any price point, with an additional 5% of the purchase price paid to [untitled] by the purchaser. Notice the structure of that fee. The purchaser pays the 5%, not the artist. That is not a standard platform decision. Every other marketplace taxes the seller. [untitled] taxes the buyer. The artist keeps their price whole. That single design choice says more about what Lilienthal and Chayet believe than any press release ever could. The company recently moved into a three-story building in Williamsburg, the first tenants, no one has ever been in this space before, allowing them to invite the artists who inspire them into their world. The app is the product. The building is the proof of intent. A three-story recording space in Williamsburg is not a startup amenity. It is a signal about where the company sees itself in five years. ## *BIZARRO* Is the Review That Cannot Be Bought Back to the car. Back to the sand. DCA assembled a fourteen-person crew, hired a production designer named Amanda Saltz, brought in an art director named Julian Budge, and built a set inside his studio to make a short film about the app he uses every day. The cast includes musicians he trusts. The score is his. The edit is his. Every creative decision in the film is an advertisement for a creative process that [untitled] made possible. This is the kind of endorsement that cannot be manufactured. A press campaign does not produce it. A gifted subscription does not produce it. Lilienthal and Chayet describe themselves as outsiders on the fringe of both music and tech who, when no one believed in them, created a distorted little world between the two of them. That outsider energy, the refusal to build what already existed, is exactly what attracted a musician like DCA. Artists recognize other artists. They recognize when a tool was built by someone who has been in the room, not just read about it. Lilienthal told Chayet they needed to commit at least six years to this; "it's a war of attrition," he said; "you have to want it more than anyone else and be willing to die on every hill until the vision becomes reality." Six years. They are roughly three years into that commitment. The $4.6 million from General Catalyst landed. The Andreessen Horowitz Series A followed. 300,000 monthly users by the end of 2025. And now a musician put a car in his studio to tell you about it. Here is the prediction: [untitled] reaches 1 million monthly users before the end of 2027. The direct sales feature is the wedge. Once fans understand they can buy unreleased music directly from the artist at the price the artist sets, the platform stops being a tool and becomes a marketplace. That is when the valuation math changes entirely, and that is when the conversation stops being about "the best app for demos" and starts being about who builds the infrastructure layer for the next decade of independent music.