Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

Summary

Podcast Summary: David Senra – Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters

Host: Scicomm Media
Date: June 21, 2026

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Overview

In this engaging and candid episode, David Senra sits down with Steve Stoute, trailblazing founder of UnitedMasters and Translation, to unpack the intersection of hip hop, entrepreneurship, advertising, and artist empowerment. The conversation traces Stoute’s unconventional career moves, his early insights into music/marketing convergence, lessons from legends like Will Smith, Jimmy Iovine, and Jay-Z, and why ownership, cultural relevance, and betting on yourself are now the ultimate career differentiators for creators across industries.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Pivot from Music Executive to Advertising Revolutionary

• The Bold Career Move (00:09 – 03:27)
  • Stoute describes leaving a lucrative record label position not to create his own label, but to break new ground in advertising—a decision sparked by witnessing both the CD sales bubble and outdated, box-ticking ad segmentation.
  • Insight: Music taught Stoute that “the idea that people listened to certain records had nothing to do with their ethnicity…but why were products treated that way?” He saw shared culture, not just demographic labels, as the real driver.
  • Quote: “When the unknown is a better option than the known, run in that direction, run towards darkness.” — Steve Stoute (03:40)

2. Culture as Currency—The Men in Black Ray-Ban Story

• Product Placement Revelations (03:40 – 08:20, 15:25 – 16:30)
  • The Men in Black soundtrack catalyzed a viral Ray-Ban trend. Stoute realized: music could drive massive commerce for brands—yet record labels got none of that upside.
  • The seeds for Beats by Dre headphones in music videos and product-driven marketing were planted here.
  • Memorable Moment: Stoute wonders why the record label didn’t own part of Ray-Ban’s surging sales: “If we're in the music business, why aren't we getting paid off those glasses?” (03:40)

3. Learning Upside, Not Just Salary

• Equity over Immediate Pay (19:31 – 21:30)
  • Stoute describes taking a massive pay cut to join a marketing agency for education—not for short-term cash, but to gain the tools and perspective to disrupt bigger markets later.

4. "Everything Is Advertising" — Blurring Art & Commerce

• Music Videos as TV Commercials (22:42 – 24:24)
  • Early in his advertising career, Stoute faced skepticism for hiring music video directors (like Hype Williams) to make commercials.
  • Quote: “Everything is advertising. It’s just...you have to entertain or get people’s attention, and then you get a message across...” — Steve Stoute (22:54)

5. Reinventing Sneaker Culture & the Non-Athlete Deal

• From Allen Iverson to Jay Z’s S. Carter Shoe Line (24:24 – 28:42)
  • Stoute pioneered the strategy of non-athletes launching signature sneakers, recognizing that “fashion, not athleticism” was the purchase driver for young consumers.
  • He describes pivotal deals: Jay-Z’s S. Carters, G-Unit’s footwear, and pitching LeBron James at 18 with a $10 million signing bonus—who famously walked away to “bet on himself.”
  • Quote: “When a young African American that was in poverty knew that his talent was bigger than that check...that was a big shift for a community of people.” (28:44)

6. Artist Ownership, Direct Fan Relationships & The Power Shift

• Why UnitedMasters Exists (33:36 – 39:59)
  • Stoute breaks down how new platforms allow artists to build audiences and careers without major labels, keeping rights and revenue for themselves.
  • CRM for Artists: Unlike Amazon or traditional ecommerce, labels never gave artists data or a direct line to fans. Stoute’s vision: let creators own their customer relationship.
  • Quote: “If the artists knew who their fans were, they wouldn't need a record company at all.” — Steve Stoute (34:44)

7. Independence, Ownership, and the New Creative SMB

• From Prince to Russ to Joe Budden (42:08 – 56:57)
  • Cites Prince’s contract battles, Russ’s billion-stream independent success, and Joe Budden’s direct-to-fan podcasting as signs of the new age—artists as small businesses, not just talent-for-hire.
  • Notable stat: UnitedMasters artist Big X The Plug made $20+ million this year—directly, owning his catalog.

8. The Next Frontier: Data, Fan Intelligence, and Platforms

• Demand for Direct Data (61:32 – 63:06)
  • Stoute predicts the next music industry revolution is creators demanding their own CRM-like access to identify, nurture, and monetize super-fans directly.
  • Platforms like Even (selling merch direct) are leading this shift; major labels are buying or emulating these methods.

9. Ownership as a Universal Shift in the Creative Economy

• Film, Art, and Beyond (64:39 – 67:44)
  • Ryan Coogler (director of "Sinners") secured a studio deal to reclaim full rights to his film—a first in Hollywood and a harbinger of change for creators everywhere.
  • Visual artists now expect to benefit from secondary sales of their work—no longer leaving all upside to galleries.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Culture vs. Demographics in Marketing:
  “No one looks at them and goes, ‘Well, oh, they're speaking to me because I'm white. Or, like, that's how I prefer to get spoken to because I'm black.’ …My whole idea was like, why don't you just find shared values?” — Steve Stoute (00:57)

• On Betting on Yourself:
  “If I didn't make that decision at that point in time, I would have never made it at all to change industries. Fuck it, we’re going in the advertising business.” — Steve Stoute (04:07)

• On the LeBron James $10M Offer:
  “We come back in the room, this 18 year old kid says, no, I'm betting on myself. ...He walked away from $10 million check signed to his name...That was a big shift for a community of people.” — Steve Stoute (28:44)

• On the Record Industry's Lack of Customer Data:
  “Rather than negotiating the equity, why wouldn’t you renegotiate the access to the data, the real access to the data so that the artists would know if you listen to that...If Taylor Swift has a fan that listened to her album 700 times, why wouldn't Taylor Swift be able to communicate directly?” — Steve Stoute (36:36)

• On the New SMBS:
  “The SMBs used to be flower shops...are now streamers, independent artists, influencers, podcasters...And I don't think industries have caught up to that idea yet.” — Steve Stoute (55:31)

• On Fame vs. Talent:
  “Fame and talent historically always had this relationship where they knew how to coexist. ...In the last 20 years, maybe longer, those two things are at odds. ...Fame is being incentivized to be famous for things that are not necessarily driven by talent.” — Steve Stoute (58:34 – 60:23)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Stoute's Leap from Music to Advertising and Key Early Insights (00:09 – 03:40)
• Men in Black, Product Placement, and the Advertising Muse (03:40 – 08:20)
• Early Apple/iTunes Dealings, Steve Jobs Meeting Anecdote (08:21 – 12:40)
• Seeing the Power of Authentic Cultural Advertising in Hip Hop (15:25 – 19:12)
• Building Translation, Integrating Culture & Sport in Marketing (19:41 – 24:24)
• The First Sneaker Deals for Non-Athletes & the LeBron Story (24:24 – 28:44)
• Artist Ownership, CRM, and UnitedMasters' Philosophy (33:36 – 42:08)
• Explaining the Old School Music Industry—Why Independence Mattered (45:20 – 51:49)
• Independence in the Digital Age: From Russ to Bad Bunny (52:09 – 54:49)
• Fame vs. Talent—A Cultural Reckoning (58:34 – 61:08)
• Next Step for Creators: Owning Fan Data and Direct Relationships (61:32 – 63:05)
• Ryan Coogler & Ownership in Film (64:39 – 67:44)
• Steve Stoute’s Story of Managing Nas, Starting from Ground Zero (90:59 – 94:49)

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Notable Personal Stories

• Kobe Bryant’s Work Ethic

  • Stoute recalls signing Kobe to a rap deal and hosting him in New Jersey: “He worked really fucking hard, even on rapping, and he immersed himself in it, man.” (72:54 – 75:25)
  • “How you do anything is how you do everything.” (75:28)

• The Jay-Z ‘Barefoot’ Meeting

  • Stoute describes a tense business disagreement diffused by humor over a “big house” and reveals the family connection that turned rivals into partners. (78:12 – 82:43)

• Jay-Z Wrote “Still D.R.E.”

  • Steve Stoute facilitated the Dr. Dre/Jay-Z collaboration, crucially noting that Jay wrote for both Dre and Snoop, capturing authentic West Coast flavor though from Brooklyn. (82:50 – 86:21)

• Managing Nas

  • Driven by instinct, Stoute went to the Queensbridge Projects to find Nas, anointing him as a generational talent before Illmatic dropped. The bond endures 30+ years later. (90:59 – 94:49)

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Thematic Takeaways

• Betting on Yourself Pays Off: Whether it's LeBron's $10M walkaway, independent artists, or Stoute’s own career, audacity and self-belief prove to be the real superpower.
• The Value of Ownership: Across music, art, and film, creators who own their rights and data are transforming the economics and culture of their industries.
• Cultural Authenticity is the New Marketing Engine: Shared values—not demographics—win hearts and sales.
• Direct Fan Relationships are the Next Revolution: Artists and creators will demand (and build) tools to understand, nurture, and capitalize on their true audience, bypassing traditional middlemen.

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Selected Quotes with Timestamps

• “When the unknown is a better option than the known, run in that direction, run towards darkness.” — Steve Stoute (03:40)
• “Everything is advertising...you have to entertain or get people’s attention.” — Steve Stoute (22:54)
• “If the artists knew who their fans were, they wouldn't need a record company at all.” — Steve Stoute (34:44)
• “If I didn't make that decision at that point in time, I would have never made it at all to change industries. Fuck it, we’re going in the advertising business.” — Steve Stoute (04:07)
• “Fame is being incentivized to be famous for things that are not necessarily driven by talent.” — Steve Stoute (60:23)

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Conclusion

This episode is a masterclass for founders, creatives, and strategists on how culture, commerce, and technology are converging to rewrite the rules. Steve Stoute's stories and philosophies challenge listeners to move beyond incremental change, embrace risk, and champion ownership—for yourself and your audience.

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For more, check out David Senra's Founders podcast, which inspired many of the episode’s insights.

Transcript

[Alex Lieberman]

Dude, I've been a fan of you for over 20 years because I grew up listening to hip hop, and everybody in hip hop knows who you are. So I'm very excited to have a conversation with you.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

One of the fascinating things that Jimmy Iovine told me about you was you made a very unusual decision coming out of a record label. Like, you could have started your own record label. And you said, no, I'm not going to start a record label. I'm going to go full on into advertising and marketing. Can you tell me about that?

[Steve Stoute]

It was 1999, and I get a lot of credit for seeing that. Whether it was Napster or MP3s were going to shift the music business from the CD, we started to see signs of it, but it was very. It was in the fledgling stages of that. So I didn't quite see it. What I did see was an industry that didn't know the difference between good and great. What I mean by that is that when an industry is booming, sometimes when it's booming because of the business model itself, mediocre gets rewarded, and over time, it catches up. But in the beginning, mediocrity is applauded and financially awarded. And I knew that because we were selling CDs for $16 and people were paying for it when there was only one song on the album that that wasn't going to sustain itself. Like, there was something wrong with that. Like, why would you pay 1699? And you only liked the first single? And executives were getting paid tons of money on that, you know, idea, and they weren't even talented. And I'm like, this is going to have to cave in. Outside of that, what I seen was an advertising business that felt like archaic. The advertising business at the time looked at the world through the lens of black, white, Hispanic. And I'm like, that's not the way people relate to products and marketing. It doesn't. No one looks at them and goes, well, oh, they're speaking to me because I'm white. Or, like, that's how I prefer to get spoken to because I'm black. These things weren't real. And the music business did teach me that. The music business taught me that the idea that people listened to certain records had nothing to do with their ethnicity. DMX was selling in Iowa. The radio station in Iowa didn't play dmx. Where Eminem was being played was being purchased in Harlem. It had nothing to do with white and black. But why were products treated that way? Why would, like, we're going to, you know, when you want to sell a Cadillac to a black person, you put a deep voiceover, like, the new Cadillac Escalade, nobody wants that. And Spanish people don't want an ad that just says hola. Like these things don't work. My whole idea was like, why don't you just find shared values? Like if you're an 18 year old African American from Compton and you're an 18 year old white kid from Greenwich, Connecticut and you like skateboarding, like it doesn't make a difference. If you just speak about skateboarding, you're both going to find the shared value in that, in the culture of skateboarding. But this other thing that was happening just felt like it was dying. And I knew that if I got into that industry I could make a difference.

[Alex Lieberman]

But what Jimmy, I think admired most is that like you, you didn't care what was expected. Like you didn't make the decision that everybody else was making or the decision that was expected of you. It's like you forged your own path.

[Steve Stoute]

So I'm giving you the rational how I seen it, the idea of seeing it that way and then jumping and to go into a business in which you didn't understand. Exactly. Yeah. Look, I can reference a lot in the Jimmy podcast. Not that I want this podcast to like be the advertising for all the others, but you know, you've had a lot of interesting people and there's is a lot of six degrees of separation in the way we think. When the unknown is a better option than the known, run in that direction, Run towards darkness. And the unknown was what I didn't know, right, the advertising business. But the known was this industry that was going in the wrong direction, in a direction where they were selling one song for a lot of money. They had a monopoly on the distribution of CDs and they control radio and MTV. And those things didn't seem like they were going to last forever. So running towards the unknown became very easy. Not because. And also because I was 29 years old, right, And I didn't have a family, I didn't have kids. I had already made a lot of money, I already done well. So I wasn't like needing money and I didn't have like a family that was reliant upon me to like earn instantly. If I didn't make that decision at that point in time, I would have never made it at all to change industries. Fuck it, we going in the advertising business. And I had a big proof point. The proof point was when I was at Sony, I made the soundtrack, I was fortunate to make the soundtrack for the film Men in Black. I had known Will Smith and his manager James Lasseter for many, many years. And when they were making that film, they wanted to make the soundtrack. They were making it with Sony, who also distributed that film. I was a Sony executive. And they said, look, stout, you do this. I wanted to do it. I was excited to do it. And the song became a hit. Right? Here comes the Men in Black with Will. But what was bigger than the song was the glasses. And he said, I make these look good in the movie. It was all in the music video. God knows what the impressions were when you measured that, if you measured it in today's sort of metrics. And the glasses became contagious because of the popular culture impact of that song in that video. And I'm like, if we're in the music business, why aren't we getting paid off those glasses? Like, why do. Ray Ban has nothing to do with any of this other than they gave Will the glasses. Like, why aren't we make. So the guy in the company that did the product placement for those glasses, while I was thinking this, he was trying to find me because he wanted to find the next thing that did that. And I was like, if we can sell 14 million glasses or whatever the number was, I could do this shit all the time. The idea that Jimmy was putting the beats, headphones, and music videos was literally a derivative of that idea. I had seen that idea very early, and my peers and others in the industry would tell you that I was infatuated with the idea. And to the point that I left the industry to learn the advertising business to. To understand the language, the dialogue, the people, the movements to shakers. I wanted to understand that business, so I immersed myself in it. Not by studying it, by quitting and doing it. Jimmy allowed me to do that. I had worked for him at that time. I had left Sony, had gone to Interscope. I'd done great work with Interscope. Jimmy and I was close. He's a mentor of mine. And when I told him I wanted to do it, the deal was like, look, man, I got your back, but bring the deals to Interscope first. So a lot of the early things that I had done were based around Interscope artists. And, I mean, I got great, great stories about me, Jimmy and Steve Jobs, you know, trying to get bring. When I was working on McDonald's early, around the I'm lovin It launch we wanted to do was around the same time as itunes was launching. And the thing about Apple at that time, the Stock was at 9 or 10 very. It was like there. And it was. So in 2001, I don't have to go all over. Enron had.

[Alex Lieberman]

Just take this wherever you want, man.

[Steve Stoute]

In 2001, the Enron thing happened, right? Where the CEO and the CFO, they no longer could. The CFO couldn't say, oh, well, the CEO told me to do it. That's why I did it. That was Sarbanes. Oxley came out of this whole thing and everyone was sad about insider trading. So I remember when we knew that the ipod was coming, cause of Jimmy's relationship with Steve, we all wanted to buy stock in Apple and the stock was like nine. Not that we knew that nine was cheap. We just knew that something good was going to happen. And we were all scared to death about. We were like, no, we're going to go to jail. We're going to be Jeff Skilling. Like, no, no, no, no, no. But back during that time, I was transitioning out. And you know, the ipod launched before the itunes. People think they launched at the same time. So when itunes launched, the one thing about Apple at that time is if they could put distribution, the expense of distribution to a third party. Steve was all about that. He was all about, how can I find somebody else. Remember, HP was the partner for the ipod. They're the ones who put it in all of the best buys and circuit cities or whatever the retailers were around the world. Apple didn't have the sales team to

[Alex Lieberman]

do that, and they didn't have their stores everywhere.

[Steve Stoute]

They relied on a third party to do that. They did hp. HP happened to be one of my clients, call it Fiorina at the time. And with itunes, same type of thing. Who could we get to distribute it? Jimmy was trying to get a deal done with Coca Cola. An executive at Coca Cola, Steve Hyatt, turned it down twice. I was representing McDonald's and we wanted to do. I had the idea, we're going to do the music meal, you know, Big Mac and large fries or hamburger fries and a song. And McDonald's turned him down as well. The executive at McDonald's sort of was like posturing. And Steve went, nucleo. I mean, nucleo and them. I mean, at the time, he went. He said some shit to them. I was like, holy shit. He said, it's like you're in a meeting. And like the meeting hasn't quite gone bad yet, but it's going directionally in a place where you kind of predict that it's gonna not end correctly. And he's seen that coming, and he just said, man, don't you guys know you make food that kills kids? It's like, oh, shit. Now I'm a young executive trying to. I'm trying to do the right. I'm trying to come up. Jimmy knows the jobs. I got McDonald's. Jimmy and I have worked together. We're doing the tango. We're going to go bring this McDonald's iTunes, Apple thing together, you know? And then he says that. And the guys at McDonald's are looking at me like, you walk me into this shit. And I'm like, he's just playing, man. He don't mean that. I remember that feeling at that time was like, shit, the fuck am I doing?

[Alex Lieberman]

Did they try to kick Steve Jobs

[Steve Stoute]

out of the meeting?

[Alex Lieberman]

How'd the meeting end?

[Steve Stoute]

Kick Steve Jobs out of the meeting? Yeah, I guess first of all, the meeting was at Apple. They weren't kicking Steve Jobs out of any meeting.

[Alex Lieberman]

So we're actually going to do an episode with Ed Catmull, who's the founder of Pixar, and he worked with Steve Jobs for a long. I think he's worked with Steve Jobs uninterrupted for, like, 24 years. And he tells a story about what a meeting with. In his autobiography, Creativity Inc. What a meeting with Steve Jobs is like. Remember the ma. I think it was like Magnavox.

[Steve Stoute]

Of course, the Magnavox. They made video games, they made television.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah. And they used to have this commercial probably in the. I don't know, maybe 80s or 90s, where somebody's, like, sitting in a chair and the. The. The music is so loud, it's like blowing the guy's hair back.

[Steve Stoute]

Was it Magna? It could have been Maxwell or Maxwell.

[Alex Lieberman]

Sorry. Yeah.

[Steve Stoute]

And the tape company.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, that makes more sense. And it's like, you remember that commercial? It's like, that's what it's like being in a meeting with Steve Jobs. He's just so. So overpowering. He's like just such a force of nature, like, kind of blows you back in your chair.

[Steve Stoute]

Look, I didn't have the exposure to Steve Jobs like that. That was. I was in maybe two meetings with him where, I mean, like real meetings where, like, there was feedback and that kind of thing, and that was that. I mean, I'm. I'm close with Eddie Q, and he tells amazing Steve Jobs stories. And along with Jimmy, that was just my version of getting a taste of it. And it was like, holy shit.

[Alex Lieberman]

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[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

When you're. Is that the first time that you're like oh wait, wait, there's like a. You can translate cultural influence to sales like business success. Is that the first time where it clicked or was there something that Happened before that.

[Steve Stoute]

I had known it intuitively growing up in Queens and being around hip hop my whole life. Much my, you know, at 16, when I was 16, was 1986 when, you know, Run DMC performed at Madison Square Garden. And like it was Fresh Fest. It was like a sort of the coming out party of that hip hop could have actual rock stars. So that was my wheelhouse. And the only reason why I wore Adidas shell toes was because of that. Like, we knew that. So it wasn't like it was a new idea or, you know, grand poobah advertising for Sprite, which is an amazing, amazing.

[Alex Lieberman]

Wait, did you do that deal or is that before you?

[Steve Stoute]

That was way before me. But I remember when he said, you know the line, like he said the line, you know, first thing first, obey your thirst. And like he talked about Sprite, like, you've seen these things or St. Ives Malt Liquor. You should look at these ads with Ice Cube and St. Ives. Like these, these, these things were so powerful that hip hop would be working with these brands and like it would influence urban culture immediately. And when I talk about urban culture, I'm talking about dense cities. Not even black kids. I'm talking about just dense inner city. I use it as a measurement of space density of people. They would gravitate towards these products that these artists talked about either in their music or did blatant act for. So by the time I had gotten to Will Smith and Men in Black, I mean, I had seen it for 25 years, but it still wasn't mainstream cultural impactful yet for reasons that I still don't understand. Like, it was very clear and obvious. But you know, like most things when the alternative is working, when the incumbent can still rely on the old business practice, they won't disrupt themselves. They'll just keep doing that. Right? Like, why would I invest any money in understanding hip hop when Kenny G is still selling? I mean, no disrespect to Kenny Xi, Michael Bolton is still selling, whatever it may be, but if those things are still working, you're not going to pay attention to Wu Tang, you're not going to pay attention to things of this. Or if you're still selling in a world in which you can say, I'm going to target white consumers. I used to talk about this all the time. Black consumers are the best consumers in the world because they buy products that aren't marketed to them. I grew up in a world where I'd see African American women buying products. L' Oreal products in which There was only white women with blonde hair on the box or in a commercial, and African American women would buy it, or the same thing with African American men. And people took advantage of that. But when brands leaned into being authentically connected to where culture was, which also spoke to those segments, they were taking market share, they were taking that attention. So to me, it was just a matter of time before it tipped. And that became the new marketing paradigm. And that's why I called my company Translation, because I wanted to translate that cultural insight for Fortune 500 companies. And the first company that gave me a shot that's still my client today is McDonald's.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay, so this is what, what I was curious about. So you're at Interscope. What are the assets that you have when you start Translation? So you' you don't have a family, you can take more risks. You have an insane network. You've already been. You were managing NAS at that time. Like, what were the assets, the non financial assets you had going into this, like jumping into a new industry.

[Steve Stoute]

When I first left, remember I said I learned first right before I started Translation, my marketing services company, I learned and I worked at an intern company before that.

[Alex Lieberman]

Which one was this?

[Steve Stoute]

It's called Arnel Group.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay.

[Steve Stoute]

So I worked at this company and I worked at, I became partners with. When I left the record business, I was making a couple million dollars a year at 29 and I went into an agency in which I got paid $150,000 and 20% equity. I didn't necessarily understand the value of equity at all. I certainly understood 150,000 was a lot less than 2 million, two and a half million. But I wasn't even betting on the equity man. I was really betting on the education. I sincerely mean that. I did not know what was going to happen at all, but I knew I was going to learn. That was the period in which I had gotten exposure to certain clients like McDonald's and Reebok. So at Reebok, that was a client that when I was partners in this agency, I'd met Adam Silver at that time, who was the deputy commissioner of the NBA because we were doing all the marketing. Reebok had the license for the NBA and I was doing all the marketing around the throwback jerseys. And then like I was seating them and all the artists back then were wearing throwback jerseys. So it became this really big deal that like, wow, this guy knows what he's doing. He has, you know, I had gotten. That's where the market was going. But I Gotten a lot of credit because it was just selling like crazy. And Reebok was the beneficiary of it as the NBA licensee. They were the NFL and EMBA licensee at the time. Gentleman by the name of Paul Fireman was founder of Reebok, who did an amazing job. He trusted me and put a lot of investing behind my ideas. And then the thing that was like the loudest was this idea that every artist wanted to be a basketball player and every basketball player wanted to be a rap artist. And I came up with this platform called the Sound and Rhythm of Sport. And we made this commercial for Reebok with Allen Iverson and Jadakiss, and it was explosive. And I had Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot it. And no one thought like, it was like, this may, this sounds crazy today, I mean to think. But it was like, how could Hype Williams, a music video director, shoot a TV commercial? I'm like, I don't even know what you're saying. It's not a TV commercial. It's entertaining content, whether it's a music video, right? Which was Men in black or a 60 second same idea. But you, you call it a TV commercial only because you run it on television, not because the format is different, just because you're running it on television. So music videos ran on mtv, but if you took the music video off MTV and made it a 60 second spot, just run it on television, it's a television commercial.

[Alex Lieberman]

I heard you like six years ago say you're like, everything is advertising. That like you jumped advertising earlier. People thought you were bugging. That's the term you use, bugging, like everything is advertising. I just talked to Brian Armstrong about this, founder of Coinbase.

[Steve Stoute]

This is.

[Alex Lieberman]

And he said the same. It's like everything is marketing. It's just like you have to entertain or get people's attention and then you get a message across that serves some kind of thing you want to happen in your business. In his case, you know, the new products that Coinbase is building, or the financial performance of, you know, the stock or whatever the case is. But I love that everything is advertising again.

[Steve Stoute]

At that time it was just, you know, when you're trying to explain something that you fully don't understand, but you just know it's instinctively correct, it's hard to get people to buy into it because they're like, most people are risk averse. So it's like, why would I. What are you talking about? Like, why would this guy be able to shoot a TV commercial? He's never shot one. I'm like. Because it's the same thing.

[Alex Lieberman]

I mean, what is the music video? It's an advertising for a song.

[Steve Stoute]

It's a TV commercial for a song if you run it on television. Right? So anyhow, we shot this content as we've evolved, and it blew the up because it was Jadakiss rapping to the sound of a basketball bouncing. And Allen Iverson can dribble a basketball and make it sound like a beat, so it sounded just like any other hip hop beat, but it was literally a ball bouncing while this guy rapped over it. And the commercial was beautiful, and it was boom. And that changed the trajectory of Reebok. And when that happened, that was a big deal. And then I started doing artist deals around sneakers. I did the Jay Zs Carters, but

[Alex Lieberman]

that's the first ever non athlete shoe deal. This is again why I want to talk to you. You just see stuff before anybody else.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah, we did that. We did the G Unit Footy was just hot at that time.

[Alex Lieberman]

What was the marketing didn't. And you guys did something smart, if I remember correctly. Like, was it didn't Jay put out a mixtape around the. It was like the escarter.

[Steve Stoute]

We did the Escarta mixtape, which was a mixtape around the sneaker. Marketing the sneaker, the S Carters. Then we did a commercial with 50 and Jay Z. No one understood it at the time. Like, why would you be doing this? Like, why are we spending money on this? And I'm like, at the time, all I could say to them was like, it's like a commercial. Imagine trying to sell a product to housewives, to women overall. And you got Martha Stewart and Oprah. That's what this is. This is like the equivalent of that level of power between these two guys. And that's the only way I could explain it to somebody who didn't understand it, you know? And, you know, the S Carters were big. The G units were big. Then I did the Pharrell sneaker. And Pharrell would tell you that was his foray into footwear and gives me a lot of credit for, like, his path into design, because I gave him that opportunity very early. What was clear was Nike wasn't doing lifestyle at that time. They thought, like, just do it was all about athletes and performance. So what I was trying to do was tap into the truth, which was people were wearing sneakers not to perform at all, just so it could match their hat, their shirt, that other thing. It was fashion. So I just Started choosing guys that didn't want to work out or run or jump at all. Jay Z being the number one version of that. He doesn't give you the athletic vibe. He gives you the vibe of like, I'm chilling. And then it was 50 and then it was Pharrell. And it was all just playing along the lines of of fashion.

[Alex Lieberman]

Dude, how many people are wearing Jordans, not playing basketball on them?

[Steve Stoute]

It was the only white space left. Because there was no way I could market Reebok as the age as the agency of record at the time. I told Paul, I like Mr. Fireman. There is no way I can convince a 16 year old they can jump higher or run faster than Nike and Reeboks. Like. Like that's not happening. Okay, so let's go into the other thing, which is the non performance stuff. And it got so hot that we got a chance to go into the performance business again. And we were trying to sign Kobe. And I have great stories of pitching Kobe. First of all, I signed Kobe to a record deal, recording contract when he was a rookie. And then we pitched Lebron. That's how me and Lebron and I became good friends to this day when we pitched Lebron. And he has a famous story of LeBron. We're pitching him for Reebok. They send a plane, everybody wants to sign him. I tell Paul while he's coming from Akron, we're flying from New York to Boston to meet him there. And I'm like, paul, we do this in the record business. And it works. You give an artist an advanced and you give it, you bring the advance

[Alex Lieberman]

right there, like in cash in a duffelback.

[Steve Stoute]

Well, that has been done in the music business. But this was gonna be a check. And I seen Paul fucking. This was some ballin shit. Call his wife. Cause he couldn't get the company to get the check. And his wife wrote a personal check for $10 million. And the driver, when we landed, had the check. We went to the meeting and Paul says, lebron, I know, you know, $100 million. You know, Adidas is going to offer that when you go see them next. And then Nike's going to offer that when you see them. I'll match that deal and give you a $10 million signing bonus right now to not take those meetings. That's the number. We'll give you the number plus the $10 million. So Paul took my advice all the way. Lebron, he is going back. He used to be in homeroom the next morning.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay, he's in High school, right?

[Steve Stoute]

He's in high school. He's going back to homeroom the next morning. He's in there with his mom and his team. His agent at the time, but he's clearly LeBron James. He's making the decision. We leave the meeting. He asks for some room. We leave the boardroom, Paul and I, we go in the other room. We're like, oh, you think he's going to do it? I'm like, man, I think so. Like, it's $10 million, man. The guy, we're paying him exactly what he's going to get paid. We're not. This is just a bonus. This is not coming from the money. This is a signing bonus. To sign it now and not take the other meetings. We come back in the room, this 18 year old kid says, no, I'm betting on myself. He didn't say that, but we knew that he was going to take the other meetings. He walked away from $10 million check sign to his name to go back to the projects in Akron and back to homeroom. I applauded him because I knew at that moment in time that the world had changed. When a young African American that was in poverty knew that his talent was bigger than that check. It taught me a lot. It taught me a lot of where the world was going and that we were already there. And it's something that I'm proud of him for to this day. Not that Reebok was the bad choice or anything like that. It wasn't even about that. It was the fact that he believed in him more than the money at that moment in time. That was a big shift for a community of people.

[Alex Lieberman]

But I think that's one of the main themes that runs through your entire career is like, you're encouraging other people around you to like, bet on themselves. Even the story you told about the Ray Bans, we sold the glasses. We didn't get anything for it. Like, I read Andre Agassiz's phenomenal autobiography called Open, and he goes out one night, is hungover and he's a wild boy. And he winds up playing a tournament the next day, wins the tournament. But he's wearing Oakleys, like the crazy multicolored ones. And just because his eyes are bloodshot, he's hungover, right? He wins a tournament. There's a crazy photograph that gets put on like the COVID of Sports Illustrated. He winds up selling a ton of Oakleys. Did he get equity in Oakley?

[Steve Stoute]

No.

[Alex Lieberman]

You know what he got? He got a Dodge Viper sent to his house by the founder of Oakley. So it's like, if that guy bought you a $60,000 or $80,000 car, how much money did he make?

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

And so your whole thing is just like, why are you giving it away? Why don't you. This is very entrepreneurial.

[Steve Stoute]

It happens all the time. Again, when the incumbent is already making money doing what they're doing. When you're making all this money, if you're in the record business at that time, think about this. The music business used to sell singles, right? So you buy the single for 499 or 399. And then the single was a way to get you to buy, ultimately buy into the artist for a less expensive price. And then ultimately, when they dropped the album, you'd buy the album. When the CD came, they didn't even fuck around and sell singles no more. They removed the single.

[Alex Lieberman]

The single was on cassette.

[Steve Stoute]

The single was a cassette, okay? Or 45 or, you know, back for that, but it was a cassette. So when they stopped selling singles, they wanted the artist so badly. That one song, one music video, you heard Hot in here, and you seen that video, you're 1699 without even knowing what song number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 was, you didn't give a fuck. And the industry took advantage of that. What's the first single? Let me tell you what happens in that environment. You spend all your time making one single, the rest of the album, right? So the creativity suffers because they're buying it anyway. So let's just try to make the first single. What's the thing that's gonna work on mtv? And what's the thing that's gonna get on radio? That thing. In fact, a lot of artists would make an album and then go to, like, all the top producers just to make the first single. So they'd make a whole album with one guy or two guys and then go to one specific person to make a song that was the radio record. And that song could sound like nothing else on the album. They didn't give a fuck. They just wanted to sell, obviously, the thing, and it worked. So when you're making that margin on that product, the last thing on your mind is who's making money off the glasses. All of the shit that's being sold in a music video. What are the other businesses that we should be building on the back of this? Because we're giving it away. And that's what Jimmy talked about. Why don't we own the end customer?

[Alex Lieberman]

Why don't we build businesses with the artists?

[Steve Stoute]

Why don't we build businesses with artists? When I first started United Masters, my music distribution company, the first thing I tried to do, the only thing I wanted to do was build a universal record company, agnostic CRM system. My whole idea was like, if, like anything else you go on Amazon, it's like, if you buy this, then you buy that, right? So if they're selling you toilet tissue or whatever they're selling you, the next thing there's a plunger. There's other things that have associated with that product that you just bought. My whole thing is that if you listen to Yeezy, Yeezus, the Kanye album, life of Pablo 30 times with why the next thing I'm referring to you, a pair of Yeezys or a hoodie that he made. It's not that. And the record companies and the artists had no CRM tools. Every other, you know, product that I've seen, digital product, you found a way to go, okay, the margins are going to be a lot lower, but the remarketing is going to be cheap because I know who the customer is. So even if I make this amount of margin on the first transaction, the fact that I now have your name and your taste, I can sell you the next product is what you talk about that you learned. Jeff Bezos knew about selling windshield wipers once you bought on the platform. And he had your intelligence, your information, he could find out what else you wanted and he could speak to you directly. The record business doesn't own their customers at all. I mean, at all. I have a theory around this. At least as of late. If the artists knew who their fans were, they wouldn't need a record company at all. If you're an artist and you have 200,000 people who love you, you know how much money you can make with those 200,000 people selling them higher margin items or selling them the music and. And then the higher margin items like hoodies and T shirts and merchandise and other things that go back to the essence of why they fell in love with you. In the beginning. When the record companies cut the deal with Spotify and this whole 7030 split, they had all the leverage in the world. In fact, they took equity in Spotify. The record companies owned a piece of Spotify. There was a big thing that came out that's like, was that value passed along to the artist, who was the leverage that they utilized in order to get that equity. But putting that to the side, rather than negotiating the equity, why wouldn't you renegotiate the access to the Data, the real access to the data so that the artists would know if you listen to that. If Taylor Swift has a fan that listened to her album 700 times, why wouldn't Taylor Swift be able to communicate directly with that artist to sell them the ticket directly selling a fan, the gear directly. The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist. Time has passed and maybe there's privacy laws around it, but they could have still had the option to opt in. Like, do you want Taylor Swift to be able to contact you? Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah. Do you want Kendrick Lamar to be able to contact you? Fuck yeah. Beyonce? Hell yeah. But they didn't negotiate that because then they would have to share that. And once the artists had direct connection to their fans, record companies would then become obsolete. I was trying to build CRM tools for the artists. So like any other brand would have CRM tools, these CRM tools would allow you to, you know, navigate with your customer and that you could be able to manage that relationship. The rude awakening was there is no data to be gotten. There's no data to be gotten, meaning that the data Source, Spotify or YouTube or whatever it was were not going to ever give you the user IDs. Right. So, like Apple wouldn't either. No. Or Apple. No. They're not going to give you the user IDs. So it's not like if that phone downloaded something or streamed something x amount of times, I wouldn't be able to send an advertising directly to that phone. They wouldn't allow you to do that. Years later, there was a law around it GDPR that talked about this. So that definitely got in the middle of this. And it was around Facebook and voting and things of that nature that sort of brought this to light. But prior to that, if it would have been shared and the artists had an opportunity to get that intelligence and the fans had a chance to allow the artists to get an opportunity to that intelligence through those platforms, I think we'd be talking about a completely different industry today. When I was building United Masses and I started in 2017, the idea about building an independent distribution company was driven by the premise that the record business at one point, for many, for decades since its inception, was you have to find a record company in order to find an audience. You get a record deal, we control radio. We're going to get you on the radio, we're going to get you on mtv. Oh my God. Because trying to get On MTV and radio, if you didn't have a record company at a point in time was almost impossible. Since this whole digital content revolution, artists would find audiences before they found the record company. So if they found an audience before they found a record company, why would they have to give over their rights? Why would they have to sell off their name, image and likeness in perpetuity to somebody? Because they gave them a half a million dollars when they were 18, 19 years old in the beginning of their career. So we started United Masses with the premise to invert the economics so that the artists got the lion's share of the economics because they actually did the

[Alex Lieberman]

work, they kept the ownership. That's why you called it United Masses.

[Steve Stoute]

Yes, you got it. And Ben Horowitz was a big supporter of that in the beginning. Tim Cook strongly believes in that. Tim. Tim Cook is a big believer. It's the Apple ethos to support and give the creator tools. They believe in that. Whether it's an architect, a designer or artist themselves, they believe in that at its core. So it's not like it's an idea that doesn't have massive support behind it, but it takes a generational shift. Because the artist for so long, it was a Stockholm syndrome. They're stuck in these deals. They believe that if I'm signing a record company a, I'm going to get a lot of money. They're going to make me global. I'm going to get awards, you know, and recognition around it. So I'm going to keep doing that. Then you have another generation of artists that are coming up right now that are like, are you fucking crazy? I own my shit. I market myself anyway. These guys don't do anything for me. At least I don't believe they do. I rely on myself first and foremost. I am the best marketer of myself. I'm the best marketer to my audience of myself, than anybody else can do, a third party can do. So I'm betting on that. So you have artists, independent artists right now that are blowing the fuck up, that are done really well. You know, we have an artist on United Masters, Big X, the plug. He's made $20 million this year. I mean, more, more, more, more. And it's his and he owns this. And it's something that he can give to his family, his kids. He owns it. This idea, when you seen years ago, like, people ask, like when Prince wrote slave on his face. Prince changed his name from Prince to a symbol to get out of a contract because Warner owned his name, image and Likeness. So he said, if I change my name to a symbol, doesn't that navigate me out of the contract that I signed? He wrote Slave on his face. One of the most successful artists of all time, wrote Slave on his face because he knew that I don't even own the shit that came out of my brain.

[Alex Lieberman]

That's crazy.

[Steve Stoute]

When you explain this to technology companies. I explained this to Larry Page was the first guy that invested in United Masses. I said, could you imagine if every time a seed investor came in, they actually own the IP and an intellectual property? They owned it. That's what it is in the music business. The guy comes in first and gives you a check for half a million dollars. He owns your name and image and likeness. People look at you, can't be fucking. That can't be real. I'm like, I swear to God, that's real. That's why these artists, at the end of their career, they die broke because they don't own anything. It's owned by the person who discovered them. It's not owned by them. Even though they have the unique gift to create something that others can't, they don't own it.

[Alex Lieberman]

They actually have the thing that's rare and therefore valuable.

[Steve Stoute]

Yes. And why I love where we are today and the democratization that digital has provided is that an artist can now not only musicians, artists, painters, painters. Like, I'm a painter, I draw substack. I'm a writer, I'm a journalist, podcasters, podcasters. Like, I don't need the publisher to be a third party that owns this anymore. I can find an audience on my own. And the power in that and the economics in that and the long term value of that is something that we've never seen before in the hands of the actual creators.

[Alex Lieberman]

Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies, Companies like RAMP, Shopify, 11Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deal will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of A11 Labs has a great description of the value deal can give your company. He said, we built 11 Labs to break down language and communication barriers with deal, enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere. We can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.comsenra. that is deal.comsenra. there's a long history of the music industry. You know, the executive essentially over the artists. I read Jay Z's fantastic book Decoded, and he talked about reading this book called Hitmen. And I think it was all the stuff crazy going on in the 70s and 80s.

[Steve Stoute]

And he's like, oh, 60s, 60s, yeah, 50s, 60s, 70s. It's crazy book. So he's like, oh, you have to read that. But it's almost like reading. It's the. Like the.

[Alex Lieberman]

The.

[Steve Stoute]

The move. The movie that they turned. The book they turned into Goodfellas.

[Alex Lieberman]

Really?

[Steve Stoute]

That's what it feels like when you read it. What was the name of the book they called that turned into Goodfellas the movie?

[Alex Lieberman]

I don't remember. But Jay Z's point was just like. All he did is like, I just read the book. I'm like, I'm gonna avoid that.

[Steve Stoute]

Wise guys.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay? So I read Jay Z's like, I read the book, and I'll just avoid doing that. And then he came into the game independent. I think he. The.

[Steve Stoute]

The.

[Alex Lieberman]

The founding of Rockefeller. So he got it, and he got it back in, what, 96. How the hell are you still telling the story in 2000?

[Steve Stoute]

Oh, wait, what time? I, you know, Jay got it because he was turned down. Record companies wouldn't sign up, okay? A guy that talented, they wouldn't sign him. He had no choice but to go independent. He figured it out, and then when he got independent, he obviously figured it out. Master P figured it out. Cash money figured it out to a certain extent, because there's different versions of this. There's different versions of guys figuring it out. Like, there's a figuring it out where you. Like, I own the whole fucking thing. It's mine, and you're my partner, and I pay you a percentage, right? Then there's a version of it. Like, look, I'm not gonna allow one contract to hold everybody, which was Wu Tang's thing. Larissa had a record deal, and it didn't work. Then he came back and invented this thing called Wu Tang. And he made sure that he did not sign what he had signed prior. When he was Prince Rakim, an artist.

[Alex Lieberman]

What was the difference?

[Steve Stoute]

All those artists could be allowed to sign. Wu Tang was signed one place, but the artist had the right to sign in different places. They weren't stuck under one agreement. So what happened in the record deal? Like if I signed the group that if anybody in that group ever went solo, they also had to be with me. That's what record companies deals look like at the time. So if I signed you in a group, if you decide to break off from the group, you're with me first. When he did the deal immediately with Wu Tang, none of them had to sign with the record company that originally bmg, rca, which originally gave them the deal. That was a breakthrough. That guys got hot off the album, the Wu Tang album. And it was signing deals in other places. People had never seen that before. And then when you see Master P, no Limit, this was independent and putting out number one top five records every week. And talking about how much money they were making and selling records out the trunk. It was like, what are they doing down in New Orleans? These guys were finding ways in resourceful manners and were making a ton of fucking money.

[Alex Lieberman]

But how did they get in? How did they get on radio or MTV if they were independent?

[Steve Stoute]

They this idea, the power of emerging subculture. They were building something on the way up. Remember, man, if you get 200,000 people who love you, the amount of money in that is tremendous and they grow with you. They didn't need MTV and radio at the time. They may have had a local radio station. They were down in New Orleans. They had a community of people who, who bought into this idea. And they were building no Limit records. And that contagion and growth kept going throughout the South. And you know, at some point MTV had to play it. You couldn't be left out, right? So it wasn't about you. You needed it at some point because it was so popular versus it needing you to break.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay, so this is the difference between like top down record companies at the time. They're like, we have these relationships with national radio and mtv. We're going to make you a star. We're going to push it from the top down. Master P and these other guys, they did bottom up. I remember Sean Parker on an interview one time, he said this unnamed record company executive was just like, you know, give me anybody in the world. Even though they're not talented and with enough push behind them, I can make like them a popular musician. Basically saying they Controlled the system.

[Steve Stoute]

They did control the system. They control radio.

[Alex Lieberman]

Is this related to what you were saying earlier, how mediocrity was like, free? Yeah.

[Steve Stoute]

You know, and I'll use references like. Like I said, you know, Kenny G, who's a great musician, or Michael Bolton. And sometimes I just say these things because I know it brings, like, shock value. But just to make the point, I shouldn't know the Britney Spears song Oops, I Did It Again. There's a lot of NSync songs I shouldn't know, but they were pounded in your brain. You couldn't avoid it because MTV and radio, local radio, they had a monopoly on it. So all of a sudden you started listening to this music. By the way, I grew up my whole life thinking whole of notes was black, because you wouldn't even. You would listen to these songs. And they were like, there were a time in the 70s where there were no music videos. So you'd hear the voices. And, like, a lot of these artists were trying to sound African American or like R and B artists. So you would hear it and you'd be like, I guess they are black. And then you find out, you know, obviously they were not. But, like, when they control the system, they could push something on you. And the power of repetition will force you to have some recall, whether you like it or not. Now, that's a whole nother story. But the awareness is more than there. And like, If I got 50, if I got a 50, 50 shot, because you already heard it, I love those odds versus the shot that you never

[Alex Lieberman]

heard it at all, Repetition is persuasive. So again, I think we both have a love of, like, I love to study the advertising industry. And I'll go back to, like, the early 1900s, when it was just copywriters were the best advertisers. But even if you think about the 50s and 60s, when they're building all the massive advertising firms, the global advertising firms on Madison Avenue, just like they all talk about this for 100 years, you're not repeating your ads enough. Reputation is persuasive. Do it over and over and over again. If you see all the deals we do with our partners, I don't. You can't buy an ad on any of my podcasts. A single ad, you're doing at least a year, in many cases, many, many years. You have to repeat this. It's so important. So going back to. You're realizing, hey, what is the purpose of a record label? You're essentially creating almost like a record label infrastructure. In your. In United Masters or through United Masters. But you're. The artists. Maintain ownership.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

So you're taking the parts of, like, you guys can market better than we can. You have control. Like, I've watched all your interviews. I love Russ the rapper.

[Steve Stoute]

R. Love him.

[Alex Lieberman]

You've done a bunch. Yeah. You've done. I've taken so many ideas.

[Steve Stoute]

He's so fucking good. The way he explains it, his passion, around it, dope as fuck.

[Alex Lieberman]

And I've taken ideas from the way he markets his music to the way I run my podcast. It's the exact. I don't see any barriers here. It's the same thing whether you're a filmmaker. You mentioned a writer earlier, a rapper, a podcaster, a founder. It's all the same thing. Painter Russ is a rapper, but he's really an entrepreneur.

[Steve Stoute]

100.

[Alex Lieberman]

His product is.

[Steve Stoute]

He is, first of all, a. He is an entrepreneur. Like, full Stop. A good one. A really good one.

[Alex Lieberman]

We should tell people that don't know him. He's the first person in history to a single person that wrote, recorded, engineered, produced, mixed, and mastered an album that got a billion streams. A single person.

[Steve Stoute]

I don't know all of the stats around him as a artist, him as a business person, and the way he. How prolific he is at explaining his business and the amount of songs he puts out, knowing that, you know, if you don't like this song, I may put out 12 songs, and then you like the 13th song, and then all of a sudden you like song number one. And then his whole catalog. When he was explaining that at the beginning of his, you know, of my sort of entering his journey, I was just blown away by how prolific he was as a business guy. To explain it. And then, you know, Chance the Rapper, like, there were a lot of guys that took independence in the whole digital era and, like, took it and turned it on its head, and they were proud about it. I don't want a record deal. Are you fucking crazy? Pay. You can't give me $200 million. You can't buy me out of this shit. That was the next step. Like when I just talked about LeBron James saying, I wouldn't take the $10 million. That's Russ saying, I wouldn't sell my publishing for $200 million. Right. Like, you start to realize the power of ownership.

[Alex Lieberman]

This is a funny story I gotta tell you about Russ. He might have said it to you on the interview you did with him. Again, both of them were excellent. When his business manager said, hey, this company wants to buy, you know, your catalog. He goes, I just need to know the number. You obviously know the answer is no. I just want to know the number so I can put it in a song. I can rap about the fact I turned down this much money.

[Steve Stoute]

LaRussell, Russ, Toby, Niue, big extra plug like, but it's still Larry, June, this Brent Fies. There's so many artists that your audience may not even know the name. They're making so much money because they're independent. And now you're watching the artists that were signed for many, many years. Usher's an independent artist now. Usher's independent. Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl. Then Bad Bunny. Bad Bunny's an independent act.

[Alex Lieberman]

Are you serious? I didn't know.

[Steve Stoute]

Yes, he signed to Remus. Bad Bunny's an independent artist. These guys are making a fortune. They own themselves. That's the future of the music business. That's the future of all of these media businesses. You own this podcast. What does it mean? The power of that fucking. Look at Joe Button. When I talk about Russ, I think about Joe Button too. Joe Button walked away from a lot of money, man. And you know, forget me and going into the advertising business, this guy left, you know, a rap career. Whether he left the career or the career left him, he went into the podcast business very early and he's done an amazing job. And then he turned down Spotify and went to Patreon because he wanted to work directly with fans. I don't want any obfuscated version of money. I want to know exactly what I want to get paid, exactly what I deserve because I have the audience who pays me directly and he uses Patreon. These are great things that are breakthrough in business models. I look at all of these artists as solo entrepreneurs, as SMBs. The SMBs that used to be flower shops and bodegas and this, that and the third are now streamers. Independent artists, influencers, podcasters, vloggers and writers and substack. They're the new SMBs. And I don't think industries has caught up to that idea yet. I don't think the insurance companies understand it. A lot of the new fintech companies understand that, but there's so many incumbent industries that don't see that yet. So they're still looking at the old version of SMBs and they're so locked in with that.

[Alex Lieberman]

You know who gets it? Like it's the founder led companies. Because just like you had that observation when you were 29 years old, it's Like I'm in this industry that's like maybe dying or this can't be sustained. It's being attacked by technology. Right. You're not going to sell these high margin CDs anymore when Napster exists. Same thing that Jamie Iovine realized. You realized as well. And so like even look at like some of our big partners. Like I'm a huge partner with this company called Ramp. It's like it's a founder led company. They think, they think like founders and they place a huge, huge I have a multi year bet on me because of all they asked. They didn't. There's no numbers. You talk about being int intuitive. They didn't even know how big the audience was. All they said is like us and all of our founder friends, the most elite people are listening to you. Let's figure out how to work together 100%. And that's what how founders think. He's like, I don't care if State Farm hasn't come into podcasting yet or they have now, but like all the money that's flowing from TV and radio is going, going into podcast.

[Steve Stoute]

Wants to know I seen this with Cash app was in very, very early. It was a marketing guy at Cash app so fucking good. Seen it early. Placing bets on emerging subculture is on its path to mainstream culture. So placing the bets on the right guys who are driving this emerging subculture whether it be podcast or whatever it may be as a medium, it's just a matter of time before those things become the next mainstream go to mass

[Alex Lieberman]

consumed product and the founder. I mean dude, I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg about this. I've talked to Jeff Bezos about this to Daniel. Like they see what I'm doing, they get it completely. They understand the power of this. Especially when you have a very wealthy.

[Steve Stoute]

You do the work. The one thing about you is that you actually do the work. You're well read, you understand the topic of each person that you are interviewing. This whole idea now that and you and Jimmy sort of got into this and I'm a big believer in this that we're at odds with fame and talent. Fame and talent historically always had this relationship where they knew how to coexist. In fact, fame was an accelerator would blow the flames so that talent could actually get bigger. So they had a great partnership. And I would say in the last 20 years, maybe longer, but like 20 years have become very profound that those two things are at odds. In fact, fame believes it doesn't need talent at all. And I've come to the realization that talent believes that. And what I mean by this is this whole idea that you are famous without having any talent, or if you're talented, you actually will put the talent to the side and do the thing that will get you most famous, rather than actually utilizing your talent to get that attention and that fame. And that's a very dangerous aspect of where we are in society, when talent is not being incentivized to be talented, where fame is being incentivized to be famous for things that are not necessarily driven by talent.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, it's not a world I want to live in.

[Steve Stoute]

It's the world that we do live in. And I don't know what the long term, unintended effects are of this, but I've seen this affect many different industries, including politics, where fame is more important than the talent. In corporations, in politics, in popular culture, whether it be films or podcasts, you name it, that fame is the driver, not the talent itself. Now, you find the rare cross section of talent, you do all the work and you have a great following, but that's rare.

[Alex Lieberman]

I think this also plays into what you're saying is why independence and retaining ownership is so important. Because Russ may not have, obviously the audience that Taylor Swift does, but Russ makes a phenomenal living. You know, I think he's got like whatever, 10, 15 million listeners. So it's not a small audience, but it's not, you know, power. It's not 100 million monthly listeners. But if you own it and you retain control. His unborn grandkids are already rich.

[Steve Stoute]

And if you really owned it, he would have the CRM intelligence around the people who loved him. And that's the next step of the music business. That's where these industries have to go next. That's because the creators are going to demand that. They're one step removed from demanding that. Like, I need to know exactly who listens to this podcast. I don't give a fuck, or you're not going to get the podcast. Whoever the distributor is, whoever the platform is, you know what, the next evolution of this, in the next three years, I have to be able to go direct and I have to be able to collect that fan data. I want to send out the newsletter, I want to send out the fan sort of correspondence like it's the platform you own. I now want to be able to have my direct relationship with the fan, and somebody's going to build the next platform that's going to become the one that drives consumption, is the One that allows that to happen fluidly. That's for certain. Book it. That's what Jimmy's talking about, what he wants to do with his company. That's, that's exactly what we're doing. That's, that's why you're seeing these shifts right now in the marketplace. There's a company called Eleven, or even rather eleven Labs is different.

[Alex Lieberman]

Even we use eleven Labs for our transcripts. Shout out eleven Labs.

[Steve Stoute]

Eleven Labs is an Andreessen Horowitz led company. They're fucking awesome. They invest in and they believe in founders, they believe in CEOs, they bet on good CEOs, they have great CEOs in their portfolio.

[Alex Lieberman]

What does the company even do?

[Steve Stoute]

Even allows artists to sell directly to their fans. And they're selling merch and vinyl and vinyl is now considered merchandise. And a lot of the independent artists have used them for a while and now artists on labels have used them and they found success using their platform to sell directly. And now UMG is moving in that direction. They just signed a deal with them. So I guess the good news out of all of this since we started United Masses is that the independent music space and there's a lot of us have outgrown on the front line, the major labels. So if you talk about new releases, market share, the independents have obviously the record companies make a lot more money. They have catalog and all these other things. But because of that trend line, what the major labels are doing now are borrowing tactics from the independents, including buying the independents. UMG just completed the sale of the purchase of Downtown Records, which has a lot of independent, all independent music assets. And Sony has an independent. The fastest growing part of their business is a company called the Orchard, which is all about independence, which is where Bad Bunny, for example, assigned to or through his company remods. So the majors are now following the independent. Watch and see what happens. Pay attention to what Ryan Coogler has just done with Sinners. Now.

[Alex Lieberman]

What's that?

[Steve Stoute]

Oh, so Ryan Coogler, top three, if not the best director, Fruitville Station and obviously Black Panther and now Sinners. We just got nominated for the most Oscars and probably ever. I think 16 is the most ever. The rights of that movie reverts back to him. So what he did when he negotiated his deal with Warner to put out Sinners, which he wrote and directed, was that he would only put it with a studio that would allow him to get the rights back in a certain period of time. So they put up the money and he gets that is Un unprecedented in the film industry. What we just talked about is happening in the music business with Russ does not happen in the film industry. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars as the initial bet. He says, you're not getting the movie, you're not getting my intellectual property unless you allow me this movie to revert back to me. I'm not giving this to you. They agreed to it. The movie went on to make $400 million at the box office. It's the most awarded movie definitely this year, probably ever, with 16 Oscar noms. What do you think every other director and film producer is thinking right now? Because once you break that ice, right, the door's now open. I want Ryan Coogler's deal. I want to get that. I want ownership. That's where this is going. Ben Horowitz said to me, you know, we were sitting there one years ago, he said, you know, he talks about the evolution of, like, the workforce, and it went from the indentured servant to the slave to the employee to the owner. We're at the owner. People want ownership, whether it's stock in the company or ownership of a print or ownership in the art business. One of the big thing with artists is like, artist sells, gallery finds artists, artists work. Gallery markets artists and sells to. You buy. You buy it for $100,000. Artists are so happy. David owns his work. David sells that work that he paid for $100,000 for $10 million. Artist doesn't get any of the lift from the 100,000 to the 10 million. Artist feels like, why don't I get a carry on all of this? It's my name, it's my intellectual property. How come I don't get a piece of this? You're going to start to see that take place when artists sells work and they get a carry every time that work is sold. The galleries, which are the, at this point, necessary middleman because the galleries, like you wouldn't have an audience if it wasn't for me. As everything else is taking place, you're going to start to see the galleries start to lose relevance because the artists are going to start finding audiences directly without needing a gallery to authenticate the fact that they are great artists. And this is where the world is going.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah. The common theme through everything we're talking about is just the constant elimination of middlemen. Brian Halligan founded HubSpot 20 years ago, and he has this line about AI that I keep thinking about. He said most companies are using AI to make their teams more productive. But the companies that will thrive and make the company itself the intelligence. That is exactly what HubSpot does. HubSpot gives you AI that works, AI that actually knows your customers and your business. Your AI needs to know what you know, your actual customer conversations, your sales history, what worked last quarter and what didn't. HubSpot connects AI to your real customer data. So when it writes an email, it knows this customer asked about pricing three weeks ago. It knows what campaign brought them in, and it knows that they already contacted support twice this month. And that's when you start seeing actual results. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more. That's HubSpot.com. so we've been talking a lot about, like, ownership, going your own path, making your own independent decisions. We had dinner at our mutual friend Rick Gersten's house several months ago and you told this amazing story.

[Steve Stoute]

Rick Gersten just got paid.

[Alex Lieberman]

He's coming. He's coming on the show. We'll let him talk about.

[Steve Stoute]

We'll edit that out.

[Alex Lieberman]

No, no, that's staying in. He definitely did an incredible deal just now, which we're going to talk about on the podcast. But something you told me that night, which was very fascinating, he's like, I really admired the fact that you bet on yourself, just like you talked about LeBron betting on yourself, the people you respect the most. Because people don't understand you built a phenomenally successful. Not only was Translation influential, but it was making a ton of money. And you took the unusual, another unusual decision to roll that in to United Masters.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

Can you talk about that?

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah. You know, I believe strongly that music and marketing, at least the segment that I focused on with Translation, it's the same customer. And if I'm going to make marketing ideas that focuses on, you know, Gen Z primarily and understands that culture is what drives decision making. If I have a music company that distributes artists at scale, I'll be able to gleam intelligence from that in order to make that a marketplace offering that no one could fuck with. That was really what I was the idea like, in my heart of hearts, building a company today, if you want to disrupt and do something that is groundbreaking, you have to live at the convergence of culture, technology and storytelling. They have to be able to coexist. The culture people can't be too cool for the technologists. The technologists can't be too nerdy to give a fuck what culture's talking about. Like, these things must work as one. So when Jimmy was talking about his school at USC and he talked about like software people don't make hardware because they don't respect design or these worlds must collaborate. So the emotion that brings these things together are obviously it's curiosity, but the emotion that drives it is empathy. You have to have empathy for things that you actually don't understand and know that the power of these things working together is going to create something phenomenal. Bono said something to me one time which is so profound that we should all take with us, which is you can get anything done in this world if you're willing to not take credit. So this idea that you're going to put the idea of doing that thing and you're not going to let the politics of who gets the credit for it affect everyone's incentive of doing that thing. If you can actually remove that feeling of needing to be self applauded for doing that, you can get anything done. And I believe in building a company that's disruptive, to be able to get culture technologists and storytellers to work together, they have to be able to put themselves second to the idea and be in service to that idea. And that's the company I'm building and that's the company I want to be a part of. That's the only thing I want to do, is be a part of things like that, that bring worlds together. And I did that in the music business. I was always working on, like, you know, how do we tell stories that are going to bring that and that together? So whether it be basketball and that, or, you know, Eve and Gwen Stefani, you know, these things that I was working on was always about like, if you could put two worlds together, you're gonna find a synergy that's gonna compound each one of those worlds, individual worlds.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, you kind of, you like a habitual, like line stepper. You don't really respect boundaries between anything else because you don't think there should be boundaries. Like even your decision to sign. I believe it exactly. Well, it's obvious to be like me studying your career for so long, but even your decision to sign Kobe.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

To rap.

[Steve Stoute]

Well, let's talk about that for a second.

[Alex Lieberman]

Let's talk about Kobe.

[Steve Stoute]

Cause you had a relationship.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Stoute]

God bless that man and his family. When Kobe came out as a rookie, I had found out that he was part of a group actually when he was in high school and they were recording. But the one thing I knew about him, which we all know about him, was his competitive nature with Shaq. Shaq was a successful musician. Shaq sold millions of records. Shaq really sold millions of records. Shaq has a song with Wu Tang. Shaq has songs with Notorious B.I.G. on Shaq's first album. I know this sounds crazy. So when I went to Kobe, I already knew he wanted to do better than Shaq. So he wanted a record deal. And my bet was that he's gonna like really do his thing, because he wants. And the first thing is Kobe Bryant would do. I signed the group. Three months later, he gets rid of the group and now he's the solo act. You know, I had a. Got a chance to know him really well. He spent a month at my house in New Jersey at the time, working on recording the album. And I watched his routine, which was phenomenal. And I watched this. And I remember I had to book a local gym and watch him shoot a thousand shots. And then he had these tapes of Michael Jordan going right, Michael Jordan going left. Michael Jordan guarding people going right. Michael Jordan guarding people going left. And you know, you realize that he didn't come to America till he was 15, 14, 15 years old. He had all this footage that I guess the team had made for him of these cut downs and shit. But watching him go through that taught me a lot about discipline. And he had that fucking early. I mean, obviously I'm not saying anything that's not obvious to everybody at this point in time, but his recording career, we made the first song, it didn't go over well, but he met his wife, he met Vanessa at the set. So it went over very well. Yeah, he met his soulmate on the set. But the experience of working with him was amazing. He worked really fucking hard, even on rapping, and he immersed himself in it, man. He was around Nas all the time and, you know, obviously Nas and Foxy Brown and, you know, he came to New York, he lived with me. I mean, he was in it. He was in it, man.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, I love the idea that it's like the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

[Steve Stoute]

Everything. By the way, if you look, that's the one thing I learned in life, that idea. Whoever said that coined it perfectly. How you do anything is how you do everything. That guy was hardworking. You know, you ask athletes whether it BE Tom Brady, LeBron, like you go to these guys lockers, it's perfect. It's, it's. It's how they play on the court is how they fucking make sure that their locker looks. It's like pristine, like all the great athletes. It's not sloppy. It's not sloppy. Because somebody comes and does it for them. They don't leave it sloppy. They are very pristine. If you just look at a player's locker, it will tell you a lot about how that players play. And that's everything about that. And I'm just saying about Kobe, everything he did, he went all the way. And then he came to New York. And I have great stories where he was training to play against Allen Iverson. And he got 10 New York City type point guards and he stood. I had a guy go get him for me and my man, shout out to my man Anton, who worked for me at the time in the music business but always had a love for basketball. He's now a recruiter for the Cleveland Cavaliers. But back then when I said, look, Kobe wants. He's going to go down. Iverson, he wants 10, like New York City point guards with handles. Can you find them? This guy go finds him. We go to Chelsea Pierce, Kobe. These guys line up at half court, 10 of them with basketballs. Kobe's at half court and they at the foul line and they start coming through fools one by one, and with a head of steam, they have to get by him and go to the basket. He's stripping the ball, blocking the ball, and as soon as he gets that one, the next one comes. He does not play offense like an assembly line. I was like, this is after a thousand shots and this, that, and it's like, who am I dealing with? And he's 18, 19.

[Alex Lieberman]

Is there anybody in the music industry that you thought had a Kobe level work ethic?

[Steve Stoute]

Beyonce. She's at the top. I mean, the work, from everything I've seen, like, work ethic. I know Michael Jordan obviously has a strong work ethic, but I don't know that firsthand. Beyonce, Kobe, Ed Reed, Ray Lewis and Ed Reed.

[Alex Lieberman]

Who's the rapper that has the best work ethic?

[Steve Stoute]

I would say Jay, out of all of them, has the strongest work ethic. Okay.

[Alex Lieberman]

I wanted to ask you about Jay Z. I didn't expect you to answer that with him. I heard you tell this hilarious story years ago on a podcast that Jay Z, like, rolled. I think this before you guys were close, he, like, rolled up on you with, like, his crew at the office. I think you were so Sony and you're like, this is the first thing. This is when we started to get close.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

You told the story that you were barefoot. Yeah, I remember. I was like, why are you barefoot at Sony and headquartered at Sony?

[Steve Stoute]

Hold on. You know, I don't know if it's cause I'm from the West Indies and from Trinidad and shit. I love I would be barefoot right now. Well, next time, I don't know why I'm not barefoot.

[Alex Lieberman]

Next time we do the podcast together,

[Steve Stoute]

we'll both be barefoot. I love being barefoot. I feel comfortable being barefoot. My son and my daughter, they take off their shoes all the time. I have a lot of stories about being barefoot.

[Alex Lieberman]

This is the first time I heard about you. This is like 99, and I think this is like a remix of like a Maya song or something.

[Steve Stoute]

And that was a result of it.

[Alex Lieberman]

She's like, tell Stout to holl at me, man.

[Steve Stoute]

That was before that. That led to that. The story is like, obviously I had known of Jay, and in New York, there was this thing like, after there was like Biggie and Nas, and then Jay was the guy coming up behind them in the New York rap scene thing.

[Alex Lieberman]

Because Illmatic and Ready to Die came out before Reasonable Doubt before, but people

[Steve Stoute]

were judging it just rap skills. It's almost like a. It was a sales and notoriety and skills. And it was just like Biggie was the best or Nas was the best. Jay was coming up to be in that conversation. He says that on the record, people on Streets is watching, who's the best rapper, Biggie, Biggie, Jay Z or Nas. He talks about that because that was like a thing. He inserted himself in that conversation. It was smart. It was very smart because the conversation really was Biggie or Nas. But anyhow, there was something going on with an artist that they were supposed to sign and they had never signed them. They basically, let's say you and I, you're doing a deal and then you don't sign the deal for six months, but the paperwork is there and you basically holding an option without even holding it because you don't sign the deal. So when after six months or there's time that goes by, I'm like, look, I was working with the artist. There was a lot of other interest for more money in the artist. And I'm like, he's gonna do a deal over here. And then Jay and his team were like, no, he has to keep his word, bro. It's been fucking six months. Like, his word is like expired. I mean, it's been six months. And they did not like my response. So it's 9 o' clock in the office and they roll into the office, him and four or five other guys. This is Jay Z, Jay Z, Tata.

[Alex Lieberman]

Had you met Jay before in person

[Steve Stoute]

or no, I'd seen him before, but, like, we didn't know each other like that. And I didn't give a fuck. And neither did he. And he come to the office. I met Sony at the time. And they're like. So we speak on the phone. And he's like, we're coming to see you right now. I'm like, great. I'm at 5:50 Madison. And they come upstairs and I'm sure that I didn't even notice at the time, they thought, oh, we're going upstairs and he's probably going to have some guys and there's going to be like a, you know, some face off or some version of that, I guess. They came upstairs, let them upstairs, you know, front desk let them up. They come upstairs and I'm by myself, barefoot, and I'm like. And you seen their face? And I'm like, listen, I don't want to have an argument about anything, about anything that doesn't involve big houses. They just start laughing. I'm like, unless the big house is involved, this is a stupid conversation. And then like, literally after.

[Alex Lieberman]

Wait, wait, what do you mean? I don't want to be involved in anything. Big house, you say it's like a small deal.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah.

[Alex Lieberman]

This deal can't buy if we're not

[Steve Stoute]

talking about a lot of motherfucking money. What are we talking about? So my analogy to that was just big houses. I'm like, are we talking about big houses? Because it doesn't even matter unless we're talking about big houses. They love that shit. Started laughing. And then Jay and I became friends and started playing Madden all the time and then realized that our. Not realized, but my. My cousin was his cousin.

[Alex Lieberman]

My.

[Steve Stoute]

My father's brothers. My father. Brother married a woman that happened to be connected to his side of the family. They were cousins. So my. My. My cousin was his cousins. So he was. We were second cousins. And like, that all came out because we started to hang out with each other. It was like, oh, right, that's true. I didn't even realize that. And we, you know, ensued.

[Alex Lieberman]

And then how soon after did you guys start doing business together? Because you did.

[Steve Stoute]

Immediately. Immediately.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay, so you did his.

[Steve Stoute]

The first deal we did was I got him the right. Still Dre for Dr. Dre. So Jimmy comes to me. This is Jimmy.

[Alex Lieberman]

Jimmy Iovine.

[Steve Stoute]

Jimmy Iovine. I love that you're in podcast mode. Like Jimmy. Your audience doesn't know that Jimmy Iovine. Jimmy Iovine, who was on the last episode, in case you really go and listen to that again. Dr. Dre comes in with the album the Chronic 2001, which is a fucking amazing album.

[Alex Lieberman]

Classic, right?

[Steve Stoute]

And he plays it for Jimmy. And Jimmy goes, are you sure that's the. That's it? Dre's like, yeah, this is the shit. Da da da da. So Jimmy's like, what does Eminem think? Cause Eminem's hot at the time, so I know. So Dre's like, what the fuck you mean with his Eminem think, you know? And I'm sitting in the meeting, and Jimmy's. Jimmy's so good at reading the room. He bets on his nose more than his Any other sense. Fuck his eyes. Fuck his ears, his nose. Does Dre no confidence tell me that this is the shit, or is there any fucking crack in the door that he can go further? And whatever line of questioning he asked led to like, let's try to make one more. Jimmy's always, one more, one more, one more, one more. So Dre plays a bunch of beats for the one more. And, like, I picked five beats. They cut me a CD with five beats to make the one more. And Steve's gonna go help get the record made, man. I'm honored. I'm fucking. It's Dr. Dream. Fuck all that.

[Alex Lieberman]

Motherfucking Dr. Dre.

[Steve Stoute]

Fucking motherfucking Dr. Dre. Fuck all that. I can't believe I'm getting on a plane with Dr. Dre Beats and I'm flying to New York with it. There's nothing. There's nothing I could be more responsible for than having a fucking with this guy cooks on me, and I go to New York. There's a beat I like, but I don't say anything. I played the beats for Timbaland. I remember playing it for Timbaland. He's like, you got fucking Dre beats. I'm like, hell, fucking yeah. Played for Timbaland. Timbaland's like, that shit right there is crazy. Call Jay. Yo, Jay, listen to this shit. You got fucking DOC yes, motherfucker. Listen to this. He hears that shit. He picks the same exact beat. The same beat I like, Timlin picked. And then Jay Z picked. I told Jimmy, see if I can get Jay to write it. I asked Jay to write the record. And Jay writes fucking Still Dre.

[Alex Lieberman]

And he doesn't actually write, right? Is this at the point in his career where he stopped writing? He's still doing.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah, yeah, but he fucking raps like a West coast artist. Listen to Still Dre. Every line Snoop says in the Hook is fucking J wrote. I was like, this guy's different. He wrote Snoop's parts on that song. He knew west coast lingo. He understood the nuance of being from the West Coast. If you listen to that song, Talking about the 405, talking about khakis with the cuff and the crease, like, he understood that thing. And they. They did it word for word and ended up becoming the first single.

[Alex Lieberman]

You just brought something to my mind because I've been reading a lot about Bob Dylan, and, you know, it's like, I'm always interested in, like, who influences the influencers. So, like, some of the greatest living musicians are like. Like Bruce Wayne saying, He's like, I just followed Bob Dylan. And when you study Bob Dylan's early career, he was so good at mimicking. He could sit in Club Wawa in Greenwich Village and listen to you play and then be able to recreate your sound exactly as if he was you. Kobe could mimic. We're talking about people. Bob Dylan. Great, right? Can mimic people. Kobe could mimic. I mean, look at his look. He could mimic Michael Jordan. Now you're saying the exact same thing. Jay Z's not from the fucking west coast yet. He could rap as if he grew up.

[Steve Stoute]

It's not even a problem. It wasn't even an issue. Jay Z can write R and B songs. What people need to know is, is I am not taking anything away from the great writers. Maya Angelou, Shakespeare, you name the writers. Nothing. Nas and Jay Z are in that conversation. They're that good. The way they can paint pictures that you would never. With words like you're watching a film is a phenomenal gift that because of the art form being rap gets overlooked because of the beats, the clothing, the media surrounding it. But the words that they paint, the feeling that they can give you, if you listen to those songs, why you love it? Because you could actually put yourself in an environment that you didn't grow up in and you could live through those lyrics. They painted the pictures more vividly than anybody else. And one of the greatest things that I've ever done. People give me a lot of credit for doing many things. The greatest thing I've ever done was be able to manage Nas, one of the greatest writers of all time.

[Alex Lieberman]

You went into the hood, Queensborough projects to find this young prodigy. Can you tell that story real quick about, like, how the hell did you even hear about Nas? And then what lengths did you go to manage him? Yeah, let me back up, too. This is why shout out to our mutual friend Jared Kushner for putting us together the way I met you. I'll tell the story real quick. Right?

[Steve Stoute]

So listen. Queensborough, Queensbridge Projects, nas, Jared Kushner. That's what you just did. Yes, exactly.

[Alex Lieberman]

But we're gonna go back, but like this, because I was, like, a little, like, sad the first time I met you, because obviously Jared's a close friend of both you and I, and he's like, we're having this private birthday party at this private restaurant in Miami, and there's. Get in that room. There's not a lot of people. There's like eight, 10 people, and there's just fucking killers. I heard Steve Stout. I was like, oh, shit. And I'm sitting across from you, and you're like, who is this big headed fucking dude that, like. I was lighting you up with questions all night?

[Steve Stoute]

I couldn't believe that you knew. No, you know what it was. No, no. I'm glad you said that. We never talked about this. I was shocked by the nuance of what you knew. The specificity and the nuance of what you knew was alarming to me. It was alarming to me. That's what it was. It was almost like, wow. But it was wow in a scary way. Now that I. But I didn't know what you did, because if you knew that level of information and you didn't do this psychotic.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steve Stoute]

I didn't know what you did, so. I didn't know that I was speaking to a journalist or I'm not a journalist.

[Alex Lieberman]

But I, I. That's why I told.

[Steve Stoute]

Okay. What the. You're more than a podcaster.

[Alex Lieberman]

Yeah, but, like, that's why I. I was like, jared, like, I need you to. Because it felt that way. I was like, dude, I need another shot at Stout, because this was. And so Jared, you know, said something to you. Yeah, vouch for me. And then Rick.

[Steve Stoute]

No, they told me what you did. Then I got it. But when you started coming at me with these hip hop fucking Jeopardy fucking insights, I'm like, fuck off. We trying to eat a dinner. It's this guy's birthday. You fucking attacking me? Anyhow, let's go back to. Let's go back. Jared Kushner definitely played a role in this big time. I'm at home, I live with my parents, and, you know, I decided that I wanted to be in the music business. I didn't know what I was going to be. I didn't know what was going to turn out. All I knew is that that was my calling at that time. I, you know, whatever. And what? Nailed it. For me was. I was sitting in my. Had. My car, was in my driveway listening to Nas.

[Alex Lieberman]

It Ain't Hard to tell Before Illmatic's out or no.

[Steve Stoute]

Yes. There were two singles, okay, Halftime, and then It Ain't Hard to Tell.

[Alex Lieberman]

Is Halftime the one he did with Lawrence Professor?

[Steve Stoute]

Yes.

[Alex Lieberman]

Where it's like, Street Disciple. My rap's a trifle. I shoot slugs from my brain just like a rifle. That's one of my favorite Nas lines.

[Steve Stoute]

That's Live at the Barbecue.

[Alex Lieberman]

Okay.

[Steve Stoute]

And then Live at the barbecue. Was him part of a. There's four other rappers on that thing. Halftime came out, and It Ain't Hard to Tell you. This is a Michael Jackson sample. And I heard It Ain't Hard to Tell. I was in my driveway. I was like, I need to know this guy, Prodigy. I can't. This is the thing that he was saying. Shit, I couldn't even believe what this person was saying that he wrote it.

[Alex Lieberman]

But he was like, 16.

[Steve Stoute]

Yeah, he's 17. I didn't even. I mean, I can't even believe. It was, like, so fucking genius. So anyhow, I was on my journey. I'm like, you know, like, for me, my idea of trying to figure something out when there's no clear path is to start from ground zero. Ground zero was, where does he live at Queensbridge Projects. Go to Queensbridge Projects. There was no other way to find this guy? Not that I knew of at that time. So when I went to Queensbridge Projects, you know, I make this joke. The projects. It's not even a joke, but the Projects doesn't have a front door. It's. It's a bunch of buildings. There's no, like, clear front door. So you basically are walking to a building, and I'm trying to find somebody who I could ask, yo, where does Nas live? Or hang or whatever? And that person immediately goes to get a gun because I looked like one of the guys that they had beef with. And then somebody tell you, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think that guy works with these producers and shit. And the second guy who said that happened to give the first guy reasonable doubt to, like, go further in the question. It happened to be Nas's brother Jungle that I asked. So I did ask the right person immediately, randomly, or the wrong person, depending on how that thing ended.

[Alex Lieberman]

And, yeah, knowing about Jungle, he's gonna have a gun.

[Steve Stoute]

He's never leave home without it. And that led to me meeting him. And when I met him, I realized that as brilliant as he was, and as successful as illmatic was that the infrastructure around him did not give him the opportunity to be able to be everything he can be. And as much as I credit for going there and having the guts to do that, I was one of 50 people who tried to seem that he was an undervalued asset. It wasn't a unique idea. He chose me and he put his career in my hands at 25 years old and I had not done it before. Why he chose me, I'll never understand. I do know that 30 years later, 31 years later, that's my brother. We're really good friends and I look at a lot of relationships in the music business and whether the person's died or they're no longer friends or partners or whatever it may be, him and I started our careers together and not one thing has ever interfered in our relationship and us being brothers. I love him. He's one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life, in my family's life.

[Alex Lieberman]

That's a beautiful place to end. Stout, thanks for taking the time, man. I really appreciate doing this. All right, man. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.