Every artist deserves
an audience that's
actually theirs.
You're earning fans every day — but algorithms decide who sees your content, platforms own the data, and every release feels like starting over. Grouped exists to fix that.
Music first, always.
Artists deserve to own the relationships they build. Grouped exists to give every artist the tools to find their real fans, reach them directly, and build something that compounds with every release.
One channel. Seven figures.
Before Grouped was a platform for thousands of artists, it was one community: OnlySteves, the fan subscription group built around independent artist mike. Jon Kilmer ran it day to day. What they built together became a seven-figure annual revenue stream. The model worked. The question was whether it could work for every artist, not just one.
The blog that broke artists.
Tim Weber started GoodMusicAllDay at Notre Dame, grew it to over a million monthly readers, and helped break Macklemore, G-Eazy, Chance the Rapper, and The Chainsmokers before selling the company in 2015. He saw what mike. and Jon had built with OnlySteves and knew it should be available to every independent artist in the world. What was missing was the right infrastructure.
The infrastructure gets built.
Finn Hodgins spent a year developing a white-label community platform from the ground up. When Tim and Finn connected, Tim brought his artist network in to test it. The fit was immediate. Finn scaled the development team and raised to build.
The founding team forms.
Tim brought in mike. and Nic D as founding partners. Nic D is one of the biggest independent artists in the world, with a business sense that matched his creative output. He and Jon Kilmer went on to co-found NDPNDNT, a community and podcast for independent artists hosted on Grouped. Kilmer joined as Head of Community, bringing the operational knowledge that only comes from actually doing it.
Beta. Then liftoff.
From January through October, the founding team ran a closed beta, building features from real feedback from real artists. Grouped opened publicly in October. No marketing budget. No social media presence. The platform grew from 40 channels to over 1,000 in three months.
Tribly joins Grouped.
Grouped acquired Tribly, a platform built by Seth, a full-time music artist with over a decade of experience releasing and touring. Seth had built Tribly to solve the problem he lived every day: getting fans in the door. Tribly helped artists turn listeners into contacts through swaps, email and phone capture, automated pre-saves, and release-day notifications that drove real first-week numbers. Grouped had already built what comes next: the communities, direct reach, and engagement tools that keep fans close and give them reasons to stay. Tribly caught the fan. Grouped kept them. Seth joined as Co-Founder and CEO.
The principles behind everything we build.
Own, don't rent.
Your fans belong to you, not an algorithm. Grouped gives you direct ownership of your audience: their emails, their data, their attention. No middlemen.
Every release compounds.
Growth shouldn't reset with every drop. Your second release should build on the first. Your tenth should be unstoppable. That's how careers are made.
Direct means direct.
When you want to reach your fans, you should be able to. No pay-to-play, no throttled reach, no guessing who sees what. Just you and your people.
Every fan counts.
This is not another super fan platform. Grouped is for all of your fans — from the curious first-time listener to the one who never misses a show. A fan's value goes way beyond their wallet.
Artist-led, fan first.
Grouped was born from firsthand experience. Every problem we solve is one we lived through first.
We're building something worth building.
Small team. Big mission. We're remote-first, music-obsessed, and we move fast because artists don't have time to wait.
No open roles right now — but want to shoot your shot anyway? Send us your info and we'll keep you top of mind when we grow the team.