What can Metalabel do for you, really?

Most of us are skeptical of new spaces and things. Do we really need to shift things up? Don’t we already have enough options?

This reaction is warranted when differences are just cosmetic. But changes and new ideas also come along that prove to be significant, shift behavior beyond our expectations, and actually benefit us.

Obviously we’re biased, but we believe Metalabel fits the latter category. A project not just cosmetically new, but foundationally new. A shift we believe points in a new direction for the future of creativity itself. 

What is it that makes Metalabel different?

1. Community structures vs individualistic competition#

While platforms today incentivize us to compete against each other as individuals, Metalabel makes creating in small groups and on your own equally simple. 

To do this, we reimagined the concept of a “label” as a small group of aligned creators who support and amplify each other’s work. 

Starting a label is straight-forward. Pick a name (your own or your group’s), a logo, and URL (name.metalabel.com) and you have a new space where you can publish and sell work. You can have as many different label pages and identities as you want.

Within each label you can invite collaborators to join you in the dashboard to build and publish releases. Collaborators can be admins — that can create and publish on their own — or contributors — who can add info and get paid.

The Dark Forest Collective, for example, includes a dozen authors invited to be part of a publishing space together. 

This structure allows for simple creative collaboration that echoes how creative movements have always worked — from Factory Records to the Bauhaus to the Royal Society — small groups of aligned people amplifying each other's work.

2. Shared economics vs solo monetization#

When creative communities are doing well, they need ways to handle money. Today creators hoping to get paid from collaborative creative work face a bunch of bad options: Venmo, IOUs, one person handling all the money and financial responsibility, and worse.

Metalabel changes this by allowing creators to automatically split profits from their releases according to terms they transparently agree to.

This happens through each release’s “split” where the release admin sets how the money will flow. The admin can add each release contributor to the split and set what percentage of the funds should be theirs. From that point forward, funds automatically accrue to each account just like the split is set.

Splits are a brand new financial primitive for creative people. A different version of this exists in music (in very formal ways) and crypto, but Metalabel is the first product to bring automatic transparent revenue sharing to all artists and creators. All using traditional bank accounts and a system we designed and built on Stripe.

Splits open up creative people to shared economics and passive income in ways never possible before. And they are happening today. In the case of the Dark Forest Collective, each author set from the book has been paid more than $2,500 from the release, all flowing automatically from a split with minimal backend accounting. A royalty of passive income, even for digital and internet-based work.

3. Valuing creative work vs posting content#

We largely remember art from the past because the work was properly preserved and contextualized. But in recent history we’ve let social media become our archivists, which makes our creative output vulnerable to algorithmic and monetization rot.

Metalabel protects your creative work for the long haul. Our release pages are built to be lightly branded, well-structured catalogue pages that showcase your creative output in its context, and preserve it. 

Metalabel releases are architected as “records of work.” Digital packages that hold the metadata, the collaborators, and uploads of the work itself, like zip files, movie files, PDFs, and other digital output. These records aren’t locked inside Metalabel: they’re able to be embedded and programmatically referenced around the web. (More on this next year.) 

This structure makes any type of creative work collectible, rare, and worth paying for. Earlier this year I released a new essay, “The Post Individual,” and used Metalabel to publish it as a limited-edition zip file with research notes and audio recordings, all made possible by the Metalabel release structure. Nearly 500 editions have been collected to date, netting the release more than $1,000 in support, all on a pay what you want basis. All of it coming from people expressing and valuing creative work in a new way.

For collectors, each edition purchased has unique edition numbers and digital provenance, which means owning a “#1” on Metalabel could prove to be valuable in the future. Collecting on Metalabel isn’t just a passive experience: it’s an invitation to own a unique edition of the creator’s work and be part of something bigger than you. 

4. A sustainable path vs a hamster wheel to nowhere#

As people release work on Metalabel, they earn collectors, audience, and funds they can reinvest into new projects.

The Dark Forest Collective is a perfect example. They published two editions of a book called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” which have sold more than 1,500 copies this year, earning the group $60,000 in Metalabel sales.

Of that money:

• $20,000 went to paying printers and shipping books
• $40,000, minus fees, was split and redistributed among the group
• 70% split among the writers, netting each author set $2,500+ so far
• 30% to the Dark Forest Collective treasury, or $12,000, to invest in new releases

This treasury is a new product, currently available only to a few select labels, we’re introducing with Metalabel: the ability for a group to build a shared balance of funds that they can use to put into new projects.

The Dark Forest Collective is currently using its treasury to finance a new book by a new author using the same economic structure and terms. Which should enable the group to publish another project after that. All while their audience and footprint grow.

This is a repeatable blueprint for how creative people can not just trapeze from one project to the next, but build sustainable practices together.

A new creative era#

We use the phrase “New Creative Era” because taken together we see a new operating system for creative people that can pull us into more cooperative relationships with each other. 

We’ve been cautious about overpromising our solution because of how seriously we take this work. We see this work as vitally important and want to make sure our tools work properly before we disseminate them. But after spending 2024 testing them as a more curated space, we’re confident in what they can do and want every artist and creator in the world to have access to use them as they wish. Stay tuned on that. 

What brought us here was the overwhelming need we felt for a new system of creative support. What keeps us coming back is how meaningful and enjoyable this way of working continues to be. Cooperating, contributing to something bigger than you, while getting to deeply be you at the same time. 

This is what the New Creative Era feels like. Want to be a part of it?