Pros
There are cool perks that come with working at a music company like Stem. You get to go to shows to support the artists whose music you're distributing, you get to listen to incoming music before it's released, and you get to hang out with some cool people who are employed at the company.
Cons
If you are a person of color, expect regular racial trauma and expect it to hurt just a little more than usual because it's caused by a company that is both actively profiting off the work of artists of color and actively promoting itself as a progressive, feminist, anti-racist company. Expect your white colleagues to get credit for your work. Expect your white colleagues to be fast tracked to promotions and raises while you get told to work harder and to have a better attitude. Expect leadership to make promises about career prospects and paths to promotions only to first backtrack on those promises and then attempt to gaslight you into thinking they never made the promises in the first place. Expect the subtext in between the well-crafted, HR friendly lines communicated to you when you air concerns about your wages or your career path to be "What are you gonna do? Quit!?" with the smug implication being that they don't think you have what it takes to get a better job. If you set these expectations and the job you're considering taking still sounds too good to pass up, I would still advise you to avoid this company because it definitely is too good to be true. I would not wish employment at this company and especially under its C-suite upon anyone. If you're not a person of color, there's a chance that you have a path forward at this company; however, I think the exec team is happy to take any work you do beyond the scope of your role and pay you an entry level salary for it while promising a promotion will come "eventually". If you are willing to give them free or cheap labor, they aren't likely to say no and are likely to milk it for as long as you let them. I would skewer the product itself but there are already other reviews on here that do an excellent job of that so I don't feel the need to beat a dead horse (funny enough, a dead horse might be a better fintech product than the one Stem is building). The leadership team pushes this idea that they are mission driven and that the company's mission is based on some set of ethics regarding ownership and equity for independent artists. They plaster that message all over social media and Billboard/Rolling Stone and name drop their DEI committees as evidence that they're a great place to work. They say that they're in the creative space to empower artists to build successful careers but I can't help but feel that they're mostly in it for either the money, the cool people with whom they get to play golf and drink nice wine, or both.
