Philosophy
About ArtistOwned
ArtistOwned was founded by radio documentary producer Steve Rowland on a simple conviction: the artists who made the music should control the story of how it's told — and benefit from its sale.
Steve Rowland
Steve Rowland has spent decades working as an oral historian, educator, and documentary producer. His work has aired on NPR and public radio stations across the country, earning a Peabody Award for The Miles Davis Radio Project — one of the most ambitious audio documentaries in public radio history.
His collaborator Larry Abrams has written every major ArtistOwned production, bringing the same rigor and warmth to Coltrane, Bernstein, and The Roots that he brought to The Miles Davis Radio Project.
Steve believes that music is one of the most direct paths to human understanding — across culture, across history, across whatever divides us. These documentaries are the evidence.
Philosophy
When digital distribution arrived in the late 1990s, it promised to open the door for independent creators. That promise remains mostly unkept. Streaming pays fractions of pennies. Algorithms reward volume over depth. The long-form documentary — hours of careful listening, rare testimony, and historical context — has no obvious home in that economy.
ArtistOwned is a small answer to that problem. Every purchase goes directly to the people who made the work. No label. No intermediary. No algorithm deciding what's worth your time.
Thank you for supporting ArtistOwned.