Metalabel Helps Creative People Cooperate

You co-founded Kickstarter, and were CEO, before you left to co-found Metalabel. How did that experience inform  what you do now?

Yancey Strickler: In 2017 I stepped down from Kickstarter and returned to the life of being a writer. I had a newsletter, I was writing a lot. I was in that world and I found myself feeling competitive with my peers, so I started to search for some way that we could have more of a cooperative relationship. That led to the creation of Metalabel, a project that would help make it easier for creative people to cooperate was always the brief. There's four of us now who are the core studio, and for five years we’ve either released work that is trying to show people ways to do that, or create tools that make it possible.

It's been a very consequential half decade for creative people. COVID-19 created a certain type of acceleration in one direction. Time on screens keeps growing, the impact of the digital world keeps growing. The model lifestyle for a lot of people is to be creative, and I think that has really accelerated during this period, and is just going to keep accelerating. For us, we enter this moment with a specific point of view. We want to create the sort of infrastructure that lets people easily do things together, that allows us as a creative community to be more self-dependent, and that lets us be more interconnected and meaningful. Time will tell how many of those things last or what their ultimate meaning is, but it's felt important to even just be advocating for that as an area of inquiry, or an area worth paying attention to.

How did it start with Kickstarter? 

Yancey Strickler: I was a music and culture journalist, and I ran a tiny record label. I became friends with Perry Chen, and he had this idea for what would later come to be called crowdfunding. He had wanted to put on a concert in New Orleans and had this idea of, what if he could propose a concert, but the show would only happen if it sold out. That would let a lot of people decide whether it should happen, rather than just him having to front money he didn't have. That initial idea became almost a fun secret project to do with a friend, just, ‘What could this be?’ Then we met Charles Adler a year later, and he joined as a co-founder. I was still a music critic and had my day job for four years, because it took a while to actually figure out how to make the site. It's a very different time than now.

It’s an interesting experience, to work hard in a quite private way on something, and then it becomes so big. Maybe it's changed the way you think about possibilities or creative practice? 

Yancey Strickler: I think that there's something in you that changes when you’ve watched the creation of something that then ripples through the world. It's unnerving and exciting. But the whole time that we were doing that, we were doing it because it was interesting, fun, and it was something we cared about. I definitely wasn't imagining that there was some sort of jackpot that we were trying to work towards. It was a fun conspiracy with some friends, and I think that’s still the same with all the projects I do now. 

In an ideal existence you end up doing the things that compel you. What my experience has been, is that if something compels you, and you're patient with it, it will have something to give you back. That doesn’t necessarily mean public success. It could also mean that your life is set on the right course from then on, and only 15 years later you’ll realise, ‘Oh my God. That was this pivot point that I didn't anticipate.’

How do you see Metalabel evolving?

We make projects that help creative people cooperate. The two driving projects for us moving forward, our two biggest priorities, are artist corporations. So we passed our first law in Colorado last week through a nonprofit we made, and that's going to keep spreading nationwide and globally. And then there’s DFOS, the Dark Forest Operating System, which is an infrastructure for shared private internets. It's like a new internet that's made for creative communities and that lets you make your own world that you can share with other people. Both of those will, I think, have long lives ahead of them, and will spawn many other considerations, projects, and things around them. My hope is that we, as a studio, are able to keep making things together.

An aspect of Metalabel is print, do you think anecdotally there's been a print resurgence? 

Yancey Strickler: Definitely. People are searching for meaning. I think a print object is the most accessible form of perceived immortality or meaning. The bar for print is not nothing, but the bar isn't Everest. It's a quite beautiful way for a person or a group of people to express that something actually mattered. 

Today, I think all traffic on the internet has been sucked up by social platforms versus destination websites. If you go to almost any company's website these days, it's dead, there's almost nothing there. I think the internet’s days could be numbered. In terms of a print resurgence specifically now, there are certainly more people writing than ever, that’s true. But in the '90s there were 50,000 zines being made a year. We're nowhere near what it was in the '90s.

As you’ve outlined already, the context now for young creatives is changing very radically. What advice might you give to anyone starting today?

Yancey Strickler: I think that there are two different motivations to do it, and I can only speak to one. One motivation to do it is, ‘This seems like a thing to do for my career, or for my social standing for extrinsic reasons’. There's another way to do it, which is, ‘When I move, when I sit still, when I do anything, these things happen. This energy appears in me, and it's just always there’. I think if you're one of those people, and this is a boring answer, but it's just about having regular practices and outlets in which to explore who you are, develop your skills, and define what your taste is. I wrote poetry for years, I had a daily blog for years. I'm always writing. For me, writing is like thinking. It's expressing. It's just a natural thing. Of course I want my pieces to be bangers that everyone talks about, but I do it for me. I would do it with no one else reading it. So I think number one is you have to have that attitude about it.

Then, and this is basic internet logic these days, but I think you have to find your lane. There's such a thing as artist/medium fit. For each of us, there's some format, some voice, some frame that works for us, and there are a lot that don't. A lot has to go into finding what that is, but you need to explore to find that. It used to be one model, but now there are so many models. There is a mistake we can also make, of trying to do every model, which is like death. We consume videos, listen to podcasts, read newsletters, and look at Instagram, and we assume that we have to do all those things. 

In terms of your career, do you think of yourself as a restless person? 

Yancey Strickler: No. There are a lot of ideas and projects, but I tend to be pretty committed and dedicated to them. Now my logic is, when I start something, I think, ‘Well, this will probably last 10 to 12 years. Am I ready for that? Do I actually wish to do that?’ I feel like I measure my energy, and I am conscious of it. I found a year ago I had a day where I thought, ‘I don't want to have any more new ideas for a while.’ It was a really nice feeling. My plate right now is exactly as full as it needs to be for the next two years, and I'm holding to that so far. 

So I think starting out now is just about your daily practice. You have to give yourself license to explore, and scenes can be one of the best ways to manufacture a breakout. Aligning yourself with other people, and creating backdoor communication channels with people with whom you sense that, ‘We uniquely care about this thing, making and putting energy into that,’ ends up having wider reverberations.

The word scene can have vapid connotations, but I think a scene of people is a really nice thing. It's this idea that everyone's commonly collected by an interest in a thing.

Yancey Strickler: “We come here because we like this.” That's a wonderful thing. It can become tacky. It can become exclusionary. It can become all kinds of everything, but as creative people, we need that. That's the reason there are art shows. I grew up on a farm in the country, but my upbringing was really through culture, through music and books and things like that. I've learned other things on top of that because it's been useful to, but that's how I think about the world. Those are my reference points. That's what I care about.