What is a metalabel?

When you're an artist navigating the 21st century creator economy, it can be hard to feel like you have a support system to fall back on. Which is why Yancey Strickler, a former music journalist and the co-founder of Kickstarter and The Creative Independent, had something of a eureka moment recently while revisiting Michael Azerrad’s groundbreaking chronicle of the 1980s punk and indie scenes, Our Band Could Be Your Life: What if, instead of operating like independent economic agents, vying for our attention, streams, and clicks, artists squadded up and released work together? Before long, Strickler had teamed up with some friends to start Metalabel, an organization that describes itself as a “growing universe of knowledge, resources, and tools that inspire creative collaboration, cooperation, and mutual support.” The group, which includes musician Anna Bulbrook, Etsy co-creator Rob Kalin, designer Ilya Yudanov, developer Lauren Dorman, and collective internet culture expert Austin Robey, has yet to reveal what those tools consist of, or what the business model will be, beyond hinting that the project will involve blockchain in some way. But, like Other Internet’s “Squad Wealth” article and Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s “Interdependence” idea before it, the Metalabel concept offers some useful language for describing a paradigm shift that is clearly already underway. You can see it in how independent artists are teaming up to form DAOs, or media pundits hyping up the so-called “great rebundling.”Naturally, we wanted to dig deeper into the idea: Whether you’re a musician, a writer, a fashion designer, or an activist, how might reframing our creative output as releases on a label free us up from the diminishing returns of the platform economy?Today, we’re excited to welcome Yancy and Austin — one of the brains behind the digital musicians’ cooperative Ampled, as well as Unnamed Fund and Dinner DAO — onto the show. We discuss what The Whole Earth Catalog, the creative studio MSCHF, and the centuries-old science academy The Royal Society have in common (hint: our guests say they are all examples of a metalabel), Yancey’s “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” and how trying to keep up with the constant churn of content warps our priorities and values as creative people.   This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe