What is Metalabel?
Metalabel is a platform for artists to release their work, and for collectors to acquire limited edition artifacts and support artists they love and discover. What’s different from other spaces is Metalabel was built to support people releasing work together. It makes sharing bylines, pooling resources, splitting profits, and collectively building a creative project and business easier than ever. The platform is part of a larger catalogue of projects we have made that are meant to help shift our creative default to cooperate rather than compete.
Why did you start it?
Several years ago I hit burnout with a project and community I was running. A lot of that burnout came from feeling like I was at the top of a hierarchy that would collapse without me, and that didn’t give me peer support.
I ended up reading two things back to back — Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, which tells the origin story of punk and hardcore bands in America, and the history of the Royal Society, a group that started in 1660 in London that’s largely responsible for science as we know it. With both punk bands and early scientists the labels they released under made them more powerful. Even for a small group of people, that identity gave them the power of legitimization and a permission to support work by others too.
This project is an attempt to manifest those same ideals and strategies, but in the world we live in today, and with the creative and internet values that are core to who we are and how we work.
Who or what inspired you?
How much time do you have? Some labels/projects/people that stand out: Factory Records, American Zoetrope, Dischord Records, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Touch & Go, Odd Future, Badlands Unlimited, the Situationists, the Abolitionists, MSCHF, pg Lang, the Royal Society, my peers in the Dark Forest Collective. The list goes on.
See everything Yancey has collected on Metalabel.