UNTITLEDINBRACKETS IS BUILDING THE CREATIVE OS FOR EVERY ARTIST

PinkPantheress announced "Stateside" on April 18, 2025, and she did not do it with a label press release or a streaming pre-save link. She did it through [untitled], a work-in-progress music app built by two childhood friends from San Diego, using a short clip of herself and her friends listening to the song the way it was actually made. That choice was not a marketing stunt. It was a signal about where the creative pipeline lives now, and it was not on Spotify. [Untitled] is the most underrated infrastructure play in music. Not a streaming service, not a distribution tool, not a label alternative. Something more fundamental: the place where songs actually become songs, before they become products. ## 32,000 Artists and a Williamsburg Three-Story Building Nobody Has Touched Before Paid subscribers, 32,000 artists, producers, and musicians, now have the ability to offer music directly to their fans through the platform. That number is small by consumer app standards. It is enormous by creative infrastructure standards. These are not casual listeners. These are the people making the music. Co-founder Dan Lilienthal has described the vision from day one as a vertically integrated music company across creation, distribution, and consumption, with the first focus on building the best place for artists to store, listen to, share, and organize their work-in-progress music, because before [untitled] existed, creators used everything from the Notes app to Dropbox to iMessage, apps not built for music. That sentence lands differently when you sit with it. The Notes app. iMessage. Dropbox. That was the state of professional music creation workflow for most independent artists as recently as 2020. [Untitled] launched publicly on August 2, 2023, and the comparison to what came before is almost embarrassing. The team moved into a three-story building in Williamsburg where they were the first tenants, a space that allows them to invite the artists who inspire them into their world. Physical space in the music tech business is rare. Most platforms are remote-first, cloud-first, anywhere-but-here. Lilienthal and co-founder José Chayet want the opposite: a room where the product and the people who use it occupy the same air. ## PinkPantheress Used It to Break a Song That Hit Number One on the Spotify Global Daily Chart The [untitled] and PinkPantheress connection is not incidental. On April 18, 2025, PinkPantheress announced the release date for "Stateside" in collaboration with the music organization app [untitled]. The song went on to become something much larger than a single announcement moment. On the Billboard Global 200, the remix featuring Zara Larsson reached number one, becoming the first track to top the chart for both artists, following gold medalist figure skater Alysa Liu's performance to the song at the 2026 Winter Olympics, which boosted the track to number one on the Spotify Global Daily Chart for the first time, with 5.64 million streams on March 3, 2026. Consider the through-line: a song organized and teased through [untitled] ends up soundtracking a gold medal performance at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when you build for the creative process instead of the consumption process. PinkPantheress partnered with [untitled], which describes itself as "a sacred place for your work-in-progress music," to tease a snippet of the track while depicting an accurate representation of how she and her friends listen to the song. The word "accurate" is doing a lot of work there. Not curated. Not produced. Accurate. The platform's identity is baked into that adjective. ## $22.6 Million and a Thesis That Sounds Boring Until It Doesn't The company has raised $22.6 million from a16z, General Catalyst, Shine VC, Looking Glass Capital, and others to help music artists nurture and maximize their creative process. The breakdown matters. The $3.7 million seed round in early 2022 was led by General Catalyst alongside Mo Koyfman at Shine Capital. Then an $18 million Series A led by Anish Acharya and Olivia Moore at a16z. a16z investing in a music app for human creators in 2024 raised eyebrows. The firm's portfolio skews toward AI, defense tech, and consumer fintech. The investment announcement described founders Dan Lilienthal and José Chayet as the epitome of founder-market fit, noting that they have known each other since birth, grew up inspired by older brothers who made music, and make music on their iPhones themselves, giving them a deep appreciation for the creative workflow. That is the bet. Not that [untitled] will replace Spotify. That it will own the layer that precedes Spotify. Creation before distribution. The studio session before the release date. That layer has been unowned since music-making moved from studios to bedrooms, roughly 2009 to now. Nobody built the right tool for it. Until these two did. Chayet has said the goal is for the entire creative process to be handled by [untitled] because they genuinely believe no one else puts as much thought and love into the product, describing themselves as "the nerdiest people, literally obsessed with this." That is not founder hype. That is a design philosophy that produced an app 32,000 working musicians chose to pay for. ## Vinyl Pressed at Citizen Vinyl, Demos Sold at Any Price Point, and the Russ Problem The January 14, 2026 announcement that artists could sell projects directly through the platform was [untitled]'s first real move into distribution. Whether it's unreleased demos, stems, full songs, or entire projects, artists can sell their work at any price point, with an additional 5% of the purchase price paid to [untitled] by the purchaser, not taken from the artist. That fee structure provoked a public challenge from rapper Russ, who argued the platform was still a middleman. The company responded directly: on [untitled], artists keep their full sale price, and fans pay the 5% platform fee. The distinction is architectural, not cosmetic. Who pays the platform matters. When the fan pays the fee instead of the artist absorbing a revenue cut, the power dynamic is different. Bandcamp took 15%. Major DSPs pay fractions of a cent per stream. A 5% fee paid by the buyer is a different contract entirely. In October 2025, [untitled] added vinyl ordering directly through the app, and clarified that it takes no cut from vinyl sales, with prices coming straight from Citizen Vinyl, a professional pressing plant, because the focus is on giving members a beautiful product. A music app that also presses vinyl, anchored in Williamsburg, backed by a16z. The category is genuinely new. Compare this to what Bandcamp tried to build before Epic Games acquired it in 2022 and Songtradr purchased it in 2023, gutting the team in the process. [Untitled] is building the thing Bandcamp's community always wanted, with better infrastructure, better funding, and a cleaner fee model. The comparison is fair and it is not flattering to Bandcamp's trajectory. ## The 100,000 MAU Mark and the Slow Burn That Kept a16z in the Room The platform recently crossed the 100,000 monthly active users mark, and has been used by artists making number one hits. A hundred thousand monthly active users is modest for a consumer app. For a professional creative tool, it represents density. These are not passive users scrolling a feed. These are artists opening the app to work. The founders were nervous that their growth was compounding instead of exploding like AI companies, worried that an investor might lose interest in what felt like a slow burn. Andreessen Horowitz's Anish Acharya, the lead on their Series A, apparently told them otherwise, committing to be present regardless of the growth curve. That patience is the right call. The creative tools market does not move in hockey sticks. It moves in habits. When an artist builds their entire workflow around a platform, they do not leave. ProTools users stayed on ProTools for decades through interface updates that were genuinely painful because the muscle memory was too deep. [Untitled] is building that kind of dependency, except the product is actually good. The platform's next move is distribution to DSPs, which a16z flagged in their investment announcement as a logical extension. The future vision includes the platform offering more features for creating and editing music, team collaboration, and tools for distribution and consumption, like the ability to distribute music to DSPs or create album art or music visualizers. When that ships, [untitled] stops being a creative tool and becomes a full-stack music company. The pipeline from first voice memo to Spotify page, owned end-to-end by 25 people in a Williamsburg three-story building. That is either the most obvious outcome in music tech or the one nobody is prepared for. Probably both.