Rethinking labels: the origins of Metalabel

Today we associate the label form with major record labels and their legacy of rent-seeking, corporate sterilization, and shady accounting. But projects like the Wide Awakes are distinct from the 20th century labels we’re used to.

While 20th century labels exist to maximize profits, a project like the Wide Awakes exists to promote ideas.

While 20th c... See more

About MetalabelAbstracting the concept of a label away from the music industry: it’s a hyperstructure (borrowing the term of Jacob Horne from Zora) that I call the metalabel. It’s a person or group of people creating a common identity for a shared purpose producing public releases that manifests their point of view.

Post-individuals have a desire to belong, to be seen and recognised beyond economic compensation or status. As an answer to the individualism of the creator economy, metalabels are a new paradigm where groups of people team up under a shared purpose to create public releases that manifest their point of view.

I see metalabels, or small and extremely value-aligned media DAOs, as a possible solution to the crisis in tastemaking.A lot of web3 media thinkers talk about the curation layer of media. How curation is the new creation. How decentralized media is more about curating the good stuff than actually creating the good stuff. That layer is exactly what ... See more

It was while reading a book called Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad, about the history of punk and hardcore—which is a world I’ve also come from—that I started to think about the label format, especially the indie label format, as a really nice analogue. Because there’s this beautiful moment of all these great indie labels where they ... See more

@ystrickler: *What's behind Metalabel?* Metalabel was inspired by specific theories about what the future-now holds: from post-individualism to world-building as self-care to the decline of the creator economy as we know it Here are six core beliefs behind @metalabel_xyz 🧵