About Steez · a record with two sides

Music runs on its fans.

Every artist you love once played to a room of twelve people. Somebody in that room stayed. Steez is built for that person, and for the artist they stayed for.

Side A

The industry as it is

A1

It started in a bedroom studio.

For seven years Edmund made beats under the name Redd, in a bedroom in London, headphones on long after everyone else had gone to sleep. It began as a love of Kaytranada’s sound. It turned into a question he couldn’t put down. Where does the money go?

He followed it through streaming royalties, label contracts and distribution deals, and kept arriving at the same answer. Music moves the world, and very little of what it makes finds its way back to the people who made it. In 2021 the question became his master’s dissertation at City, University of London. What if the people who love an artist could back them directly, and truly matter to them for it?

Ravi Chandarana was in the same class, and he already knew the problem from the other side. He had spent years in music, fashion and artist management, close enough to see what the industry asks of artists and how little it hands back. He read the dissertation and saw a company in it.

He joined as co-founder in March 2022. While Edmund built the product, Ravi built everything around it: the partnerships with artists, the team and its advisors, the research with fans, and the pitches that put Steez on stage. They have been building the answer together ever since.

A2

The numbers

£20,700The average a UK musician makes from music in a year. 43% of them make less than £14,000 a year from it.

Source: Help Musicians & Musicians’ Union, Musicians’ Census (2023) (opens in a new tab)

1%About 1% of the artists on Spotify receive 90% of its streams. The other 99% share what’s left.In the UK, over 60% of streams go to the top 0.4% of artists.

Source: Spotify Technology S.A., Q2 2020 shareholder letter (SEC Form 6-K) (opens in a new tab)

Source: Competition and Markets Authority, music streaming market study (2022) (opens in a new tab)

59%59% of creators in their first year haven’t made any money from their work yet.

Source: Linktree, 2022 Creator Report (9,576 creators) (opens in a new tab)

The illusion of successFrom the outside, music looks like a business of winners. We see the sold-out arenas, the platinum plaques, the streams in the billions. What we don’t see is everyone holding it up.More than half of UK musicians (53%) keep their music going with money from other work, and nearly a third (30%) report poor mental wellbeing. They teach, deliver, pour pints and work nights so they can keep making the songs we play on the way to work. The industry calls it paying your dues. We call it a system that runs on people it rarely pays back.

Source: Help Musicians & Musicians’ Union, Musicians’ Census (2023) (opens in a new tab)

A3

Two sources of inspiration

Why it’s needed

‘Steez’ is older than any of us. Hip hop has carried the word since at least 1982, and Gang Starr made it a standard with You Know My Steez. It means style with ease: the thing that is yours and can’t be copied.

Courtney Everald Dewar Jr. took the word as his name. As Capital STEEZ he co-founded Pro Era in Brooklyn in 2011, helped start the Beast Coast movement and released AmeriKKKan Korruption at eighteen. What set him apart was spirit: the third eye, ‘47’, balance and a higher awareness. It is crucial to artistry, and missing from the industry. We lost Courtney in 2012, at nineteen. Like too many of our heroes, he was gone far too soon.

That is what our Steez represent: harmonising with a creator’s aura, their world. We named them after him because artists still face the choice he refused. Stay true to the work, or make a living from it. We think they should get both.

Why I believed I could build it

My father, Joseph Berkmann, lived for ninety-four years and spent most of them building things people loved. He came to London from Austria, opened a restaurant called Genevieve in the 1960s and grew a family of them around it. He brought Beaujolais Nouveau to Britain on nothing more than a handshake with Georges Duboeuf. In 1964 he started the wine business that became Berkmann Wine Cellars, now the largest family-owned wine importer in the country.

He taught me to taste wine before I was old enough to drink much of it, and our house was never without classical music. From him I learnt that artistry isn’t only found on stages and canvases. It lives in the way a cellar is kept, a table is laid and a promise is honoured.

Steez was going to be how I looked after him, how I gave something back and how I made him proud. He passed away this year. I’m still building it for him.

Edmund

  1. A4

    What we believe

    Fans are people, not numbers.

    Somewhere there’s a fan who found an artist at their first gig, bought every release and knows every word. On most platforms that person is a dot on a graph. We think they belong in the room: close to the music, heard by the artist and remembered for being there first.

  2. Artists should own what they build.

    You wrote the songs. You found the people who love them. No platform should be able to bury your posts, rewrite the rules overnight or stand between you and your audience. On Steez the community you build is yours to keep.

  3. Good work should find its listeners.

    Some of the best music you will ever hear hasn’t reached you yet, because it didn’t have an ad budget. We are building discovery around the work itself, so that what’s honest and new can travel as far as it deserves.

  4. Your data is not for sale.

    What you listen to at two in the morning, who you support and what you say to them is yours. Most social media runs on advertising, which means your attention is what’s being sold. Steez is paid for by fans backing the artists they love. Your data is not for sale, and we don’t use what you post to train AI models that generate images, audio or video. All we do with it is get better at connecting fans to their next favourite artist.

  5. No compromises. No trade-offs. No selling out.

    We would rather grow slowly than build something that asks artists to become someone else to survive. Every decision we make faces the same question. Does this let an artist stay true to their work and still make a living from it? If it doesn’t, it doesn’t ship.

Side B

The solution

B1

How that shows up

  1. Every artist gets a Village, a private place to talk, share and gather with the people who back them.
  2. Mosaic puts public and exclusive posts side by side, so new listeners can find an artist and supporters always get a little more.
  3. Fans back an artist their way: a Steez for £30, a monthly subscription at a price the artist sets, or moments to collect from £1.99.
  4. Every artist gets a creator page on the web that anyone can open, no account needed.

  1. B2

    Where we’re going

    Now

    Steez is live on iPhone and Android, and our first artists are opening their communities.

  2. Next

    Better tools for artists to run those communities, release to their supporters first and see who is really listening.

  3. The long run

    A music world where an independent artist with a thousand true fans can live from their work without chasing virality, and where the people who believed first are remembered for it.

B3

The story so far

    1. 2014–2021Edmund makes music as “Redd” and studies how creators get paid
    1. 2021The idea becomes Edmund’s MSc dissertation at City, University of London
    2. Sep 2021Work on Steelo begins
    1. Mar 2022Ravi Chandarana joins as co-founder
    1. 2023First interactive Figma demo of the app
    1. 2024Full UI overhaul and the first prototype on mobile
    2. 202425 creators sign on to guide what we build
    3. 2024Steelo Labs Ltd incorporated; Edmund goes full-time
    4. Late 2024Graduates from the Uniswap Hook Incubator (Atrium Academy)
    5. Nov 2024Nick Mudge joins as an advisor
    1. Jan 2025Dyme-A-Duzin joins as creative advisor
    2. Jan to Apr 2025Innovate UK’s Design for Growth coaching programme
    3. Mar 2025Cameron Arnette joins as marketing advisor
    4. May 2025Louis Nwadike joins as full-stack developer
    5. 2025The whole back end and front end built from the ground up
    6. Summer 2025On stage at NapulETH in Naples
    7. Oct 2025Steez Alpha goes out to first users
    1. Feb 2026The Steez trademark is granted
    2. Feb 2026James McAllister joins the board of advisors
    3. Q1 2026App finalised; Apple approves Steez for release; Beta
    4. Apr to May 2026Grishin Robotics Accelerator, with Demo Day on stage in London on 14 May
    5. Jun 2026Pitched at Web3 Demo Day
    6. 2026Final adjustments for the public release. Steez is out now

B4

The people behind it

Photo of Edmund Berkmann

Edmund Berkmann

Founder & CEO

Producer (“Redd”) turned founder. Seven years making music, an MSc in Entrepreneurship from City, University of London, and a past life running an 8–14-person indie game team and a sales-analytics desk. Designed and built the Steez app himself, back end and front end.

Photo of Ravi Chandarana

Ravi Chandarana

Co-Founder & COO

Runs the company around the product: artist partnerships, hiring and advisors, fan research and commercial planning, and he pitches Steez on stage. Came up through operations, fashion and music artist management, and studied at Bayes Business School, City, University of London.

Photo of Louis Nwadike

Louis Nwadike

Full-stack Developer

AI engineer and founder of Lazervault. Builds across the app’s back end and front end.

Advisors

  • Photo of James McAllister

    Commercial strategy

    James McAllister

    Founding go-to-market lead at Ceto. Advises on commercial strategy, go-to-market and partnerships.

  • Photo of Cameron Arnette

    Marketing

    Cameron Arnette

    Advertising account director (MBA) with a background in creative operations. Advises on marketing.

  • Photo of Nick Mudge

    Architecture

    Nick Mudge

    Software architect and author of the Diamond standard for modular software. Advises on architecture.

  • Photo of Dyme-A-Duzin

    Creative

    Dyme-A-Duzin

    Brooklyn rapper and songwriter. Advises on the artist experience and creative direction.

As heard on

  • Bits and Atoms, episode 24 (Grishin Robotics), with Ravi and Ed on the artist-fan disconnect
  • Lopo founder interview
  • Bae Watch by Bae HQ

B5

Talk to us

Email ussupport@steez.spaceJoin the conversationTelegram community (opens in a new tab)

A human replies within two working days. The first 50 artists on Steez get four onboarding calls with the team.

Frequently asked questions

Subscribe to their page for ongoing access to their exclusive content and community, or unlock a specific piece of content as a one-off purchase. Both give you immediate access.

Creators keep 80% of what fans pay, after VAT, across subscriptions and one-off unlocks.

Yes. Billing is monthly and you can cancel at any time.

Yes. Get it on the App Store or Google Play.

Get in touch and we’ll set up your page. The first 50 artists on Steez get four onboarding calls with the team.

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