Stephan Lipp
Co-Founder, artist, fan, and the guy who still believes songs matter.
Stephan has been making music since he was five. His musical path was not exactly linear: recorder, French horn, trumpet, saxophone, drums, guitar, bass and vocals all made an appearance – not always gracefully, as he would be the first to admit. Singing stayed. Songwriting stayed even more.
He wrote his first songs as a teenager on an old Mac SE with a cracked version of Cubase (don’t tell them), and has been building songs ever since. His musical home is somewhere between rock, metal, melody, bombast, prog, pop and the occasional guilty mainstream chorus. If a song has a strong melody and a good arrangement, it has his attention.
Today, Stephan is active with Eranaës, his melodic prog (disco) metal project, and Ferris McFoley, where 80s cover songs are dragged into rock and metal territory with appropriate (dis)respect as well as writing songs for other artists.
Tipino grew out of exactly that musician’s reality: writing songs, arranging them, finding musicians, recording, producing, mixing, mastering, making videos, doing promotion – and then seeing very little come back through streaming, even when people actually listen.
Stephan does not hate streaming. Quite the opposite. He loves having music everywhere, discovering new artists, and the fact that musicians can theoretically reach listeners all over the world. But he also knows the other side: the costs, the work, the invisible effort behind every release, and the frustration when streaming turns music into something people use constantly but rarely value directly.
Outside music, Stephan works as a project manager with a strong background in business analysis, requirements engineering, concepts and web applications. In other words: he knows how ideas become usable products – and also where they usually break.
With Tipino, his goal is not to “save the music industry”. That would be nonsense. The goal is more specific: to give fans a simple, transparent way to support the artists they actually listen to. Not as charity. Not as guilt. More like the old logic of buying a record – just adapted to a world where most people stream.
Tipino is built by artists and fans, for artists and fans. Stephan happens to be both.