What’s a metalabel?

A metalabel is a release club where groups of people who share the same interests collaborate to drop and support work together. A metalabel is a lightweight structure that creates economic, emotional, and creative alignment between collaborators.

The Creator Economy is creativity in single-player mode. Every creator competing against everyone else for followers and attention, incentivizing a never-ending stream of content production, isolation, and burnout.

A metalabel is creativity in multiplayer mode. Groups of people pooling skills, audiences, and resources in support of a larger creative vision.

Metalabels IRL

Imagine a group of four people who all write popular newsletters about the same subject. Even if they all share the same core goals, the economics and incentives of the Creator Economy pit these people against each other for subscribers and attention.

But one day these writers become burned out by the content grind. They decide to stop competing against each other for readers and experiment with doing things together instead. How would they do it?

One person could just be the bank for the group, but maybe they don’t know each other well enough for that.

They wouldn’t create a new business entity for this whole thing – that’s way too much.

But by using the structure of a metalabel, the group would be able to quickly create a new identity, release work, and begin to build a shared treasury from their work together.

How metalabels work

Metalabels incentivize collaboration between creators, and progress on larger cultural goals:

Members of a metalabel share audiences, funds, and decision-making to fulfill purposes larger than any one creator could do on their own.

The metalabel, the creator, their collaborators, and their communities work together to support and promote releases, expanding the circle of support for the metalabel’s purpose and drops.

Funds raised from releases are split between the collaborators who made the work and the treasury of the metalabel who released the work according to transparent terms both have agreed to.

Treasury funds are invested into new projects that fulfill the metalabel’s purpose and that will continue to grow their influence and treasury.