[untitled] Co-founders Dan Lilienthal & José Chayet on the Rise of the DIY Artist and How Their Platform Will Kickstart a Music Renaissance

One of the biggest challenges that artists are continually running up against is finding the right place to store their music. In digital audio workstations (DAW), the music still feels very much like it’s still being conceptualized. On digital streaming platforms (DSP) like Spotify and Apple Music, the music feels fully realized and ready for mass-consumption. What about the place in the middle of the two? This liminal space between creation and official release is where Dancho and José are planting the seeds for a creative technology revolution. [untitled] is the brainchild of these two childhood friends, with the crux of their revolutionary music platform being the creation of a sacred place to store and listen-to music that’s still a work-in-progress. We recently caught up with them both to discuss the genesis of their platform, how they are facilitating a new generation of artistic collaboration, and the importance of treating “unfinished” music as precious.

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How did the two of you meet one another?

Dancho: Well, we’ve known each other since before we were born. Sounds a bit ridiculous, but we come from a Mexican community that immigrated from Mexico City to San Diego. Our parents knew each other from Mexico City. Our great grandparents, actually, we found out recently, used to be friends, and they used to go to the park together. We became really close over the fact that we're both the youngest of three siblings. Our older brothers were a huge inspiration for us musically. All of our older brothers were really obsessed with music together. They were even in bands together. His brother used to drive my brothers to the concerts in San Diego.

We also grew up like eight minutes away from each other, and developed very similar interests. We were both obsessed with music, and then we both became obsessed with technology and Apple and all this stuff, and it just kind of happened beyond us in some ways. Someone else was dictating our relationship.

José: When I was in 9th grade, Dan came up to me, and he's like, “We should build an app.” And I said, “Yeah, I do want to build an app. I'm actually thinking of a project or whatever. And then Dan's like, “I'm thinking about a way to be able to create your own clothing, like a fashion app, where I can just put in my own design, and then get that clothing shipped to my house.” And I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like a really cool idea.” We just kind of kept chatting from there.?

Dancho: That's the start of our book. That's the intro.

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If you had to explain the idea behind [untitled] to a kid, how would you?

José: I think for a? kid that's making music, it's literally a place to get started. Our mission is to nurture and maximize the creative process for artists. As a kid, you're at the beginning of that journey and [untitled] will be your best friend throughout it.

Dancho: We're building the best place to store, listen to, and organize work-in-progress music. One of the most exciting parts is that we'll see all these kids who start making music when they're, like, 12/13, start using [untitled] to store their ideas and develop them. Then by the time they're like 24/25 and they're blowing up, they'll be able to go back to their [untitled] and have ten years worth of ideas all in one place. With [untitled], you're able to start documenting your entire creative journey, your entire evolution as an artist.

José: That's the coolest thing to say to a kid. You know how kids growing up will sometimes consider making a time capsule? That’s what [untitled] does for your music.

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When did the idea for [untitled] first come into existence?

Dancho: As we said, we've been obsessed with technology since we were kids, and we've been obsessed with music since we were kids.By the time we were in college, we were working with startups. So that's kind of like what we were doing professionally. We were doing internships, doing all that stuff, just trying to break into the tech world. In parallel, we started getting re-obsessed with music now as not just consumers, but actually making music. During my sophomore year of college, José started making music and he started sending it to me, and I was like, “Damn, this is cool.”

He was making these awesome beats on his phone, and was sending them to me just for fun. I also started dabbling in making music on GarageBand. Around this time, José also introduced me to BROCKHAMPTON, who were a huge inspiration for us – seeing all these kids who were just making music in their bedroom.

Around the same time, we both had started to get some experience with helping out our friends who made music. My older brother is a musician, so I was helping him out with his group. As we got deeper into this world? we became really frustrated with the tools that existed for that entire process. Especially coming from the startup world, we're so used to all these incredible productivity tools that exist for all these different industries. You have tools like Notion, you have tools like Figma, you have all these productivity tools? In music it just felt like there weren't really beautiful tools built to help artists nurture and maximize their creative process. We decided that we wanted to build a company that had that at the core of its mission. So we built [untitled].

José: I think Dan and I realized that music is a four dimensional form of communication. It's just a way of communicating between one person and another. Sometimes friends send each other music. It's easier than sending like a 30 sentence paragraph over text on how they're feeling. You could just send a song and then immediately understand how they’re feeling. We all tend to think about music as this thing that you release to the world, but in reality, there's a lot of music being sent just between close friends. In fact, if an artist is releasing maybe, let's say, ten albums over the course of their career, which is maybe like 100 - 200 songs, then they've definitely made over 10,000 songs. A lot of that music gets sent to just a few people, whether it's your mom, your significant other, whatever. For musicians, I think there's this pressure for the music that's released on DSPs. In reality, the other 9000 tracks that you haven't released are very valuable. They have intrinsic value. They have the spiritual value of your emotions, of who you are as a person. Artists shouldn't feel like they are beholden to experiencing their music in a predefined way. Sometimes fully materializing a song is just sending it to your mom or sending it to your friend or sending it to your bandmates. Right now, the mainstream concept of fully materializing your music is putting it on Spotify or on Apple Music.

We saw this gap between the DAW and the DSPs. In the DAW, a song feels like it's still being worked on in terms of editing and production. On DSPs, it feels like it's already a finished product. We saw this space where you want your music to feel materialized without it being on a streaming service. When you bounce your music out of the DAW, where are you going to listen to it? A song doesn’t feel realized on the Files app and Dropbox. It feels like a random file. On [untitled], a song comes to life, and you can let it sit there without pressure.

Dan: It's really sad that for many artists pre-[untitled], they had to listen to their precious creation, their precious emotional output, on a product that does not really value it. Right? You put the song that you wrote after you were sad one evening because your girlfriend broke up with you on Dropbox or the Files app, and it literally just feels like any other file. It's sitting right next to this PDF that your boss sent you. It's like sitting right next to where my emotions are is this random PDF about my professional life. There isn't this sense of treating unreleased music sacredly. It's kind of bizarre that it's easier and more delightful to listen to someone else's song on Spotify than to one’s own music on whatever service you're using. [untitled] is designed to treat your unreleased music preciously, and be the best place to listen to it.

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How is [untitled] facilitating collaboration between artists?

Dancho: On [untitled] today, what I can do is make a project. Call it José and Dan's Retreat #1. I make this project. I enable the link, because every project starts off private on [untitled]. As José mentioned earlier, we care a lot about privacy and making sure artists feel like they're in control of everything that they upload on [untitled]. If they don't want anyone to see it, they only want themselves to see it. We want them to know that it's private.

So in order to be able to share on [untitled], you have to enable the link, which means create a link that you can now share with someone else. In those link settings, there's a toggle that says “Allow Collaboration”. Super straightforward. You flip that toggle on, and I send it to José. Now José is basically a collaborator on that project. He can upload audio to it as well. He can edit the cover art, he can edit the title, he can rearrange the tracks. He can do almost everything?that the owner can do.?

Not everything, but almost everything the owner can. And now it's a collaborative project. It's literally like if we're making an album together, we're both in control of that album. Now, if José wants to add a cover art that he thinks could be a good fit, he can go ahead and add the cover art. It's really beautiful to see great records come to life in that way.

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If [untitled] was able to launch in any era of music, which would it be?

Dancho: Honestly, this is the perfect time. The DIY artist is now the most powerful person in the room. The person who can do it all themselves is the most powerful person in the room. Why are we seeing a rise in DIY artists? Because technology is allowing us to be DIY. As I was saying earlier, right? Like 20-30 years ago, you needed a recording engineer, you needed to know how to play guitar, you needed to know how to play the drums. You needed to know all these technical skills to be able to make something great. Whereas now you just have to have good taste and you have to make good choices, right? Now is really the only time in history that this has been possible.

José: If I really had to make a decision, I would say the early 2000s. I was pretty young. I turned 10 in 2006, but I already had my top favorite bands locked in. I missed out on so many bands that I didn't even know about until ten years later. So anywhere from 2000 to 2010, those ten years. It would have been such a blast to build tools for that era. In general, I think I agree with Dan's choice. At the end of the day, the present is so exciting, but also sometimes you want to get nostalgic and you want to kind of be like where you were when you were six years old. So I don't know.

Dancho: If I'm just going full dreamlike and everything that we have today already exists, honestly, I would actually go more towards the future than the past. I'm really curious about the next 50 to 100 years. We're probably going to go to Mars, right? In 100 years we're probably going to have the first levels of settlements on Mars. I'd be really curious to see what type of music gets made there, and I'd be really curious to see how that music is being shared with people on Earth. Like literally interplanetary collaboration for music. Right now we hear of people making music in Mexico and collaborating with someone in the States, or people making music in Europe and collaborating with someone in the US. I’m so curious to see what's going to happen once we reach a level of settlement on Mars where there's, like, interplanetary collaboration.

[untitled] lives at the intersection of technology and music, and shines a light on the profound impact that software will continue to have on the music industry. How do you see technologies such as [untitled] continue to impact the industry as we know it?

Dancho: With [untitled], we're not in service to the music industry. We're in service to great music and to creativity. At the end of the day, other companies may be trying to make the music industry more efficient and optimize the music industry, and a lot of those products aren’t really built with the creative person in mind. They don't build for the musician. They don't build for the artist or the producer. That's the biggest difference between us and all the other tools that maybe are trying to compete with us. We are in service to great music and to creativity.

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How do you see [untitled] impacting music and the music industry over the next 5-10 years?

José: It would be amazing if in the next five to ten years, you're going to be listening to your friends' music more than you're listening to people's music who you don't know. Dan and I are going to be very happy when that day happens.

Dancho: I think over the next 5-10 years, [untitled] will create a renaissance of great music. We're allowing it to be way easier to listen to your music. Everyone knows that listening to your music is key to creating great music. Listening to your demos over and over and over again is key to making them great, because you have to get into the details. You have to get into the weeds.

The best art in the world, the best pieces by Picasso, were done because he created a shit ton of drafts. He literally made tons of drafts. That's what made Picasso so great. He made a bunch of drafts to create that perfection, right? And in music, the same goes. You have to go through a lot of demos. You have to go through a lot of versions to land at the best one. [untitled] is making it easy to listen to all those versions and obsess over them. Our app is the only file sharing app in the world that allows you to loop demos. Literally, you can just click “loop”, and it will loop over and over and over again. No other app can do that for your own unreleased music.

To summarize, I think a lot of great music is going to come out in the next 5-10 years because our product is going to allow you to really draft your ideas, obsess over your demos, and get deep into the music that you're making.

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If you guys could create your dream supergroup of artists, who would you select?

Dancho: All right. For me. It's George Harrison. Salvador Dalí as a designer for the group, he can make music too if he wants. Kevin Parker. Need to sprinkle in someone who's really good at just making every detail. I would have a really interesting female vocalist to add interesting flavors to the sound. I'd probably add Joni Mitchell to the group. Joni Mitchell, George Harrison, Kevin Parker, Salvador Dalí.?

José: I prefer his band. I want his band.

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What was the first album you bought with your own money?

I don't remember buying it. My parents probably bought it for me, but I remember one of the first CDs I had was Blink 182. Just the self-titled album.

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What’s one album that you’d take wherever you go?

Dancho: ‘The White Album’ by the Beatles. It’s had a deep connection to me since I was a kid.

José: ‘Kakashi’ by Yasuaki Shimizu

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What does the phrase “big ass kid” mean to you??

Dancho: Instinctively, it's an adult with a very childlike curiosity. I think one of the keys to staying creative and constantly being able to create interesting ideas is having a childlike curiosity – following your instincts and emotions, and not overthinking anything. It’s an adult with an insane level of a childlike curiosity.?

José: Not too much to add. I think Dan and I really love the concept of childlike curiosity. Hearing the word kids, it definitely brings you to that concept immediately.

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