(2022-04-21) Hon Metalabels Or Geocities Brands And Old Mode

Dan Hon on Metalabels, or: Geocities Brands, and Old Mode. Yesterday I went to Near Future Lab’s General Seminar 20 on metalabels

Here’s what the General Seminar writeup had to say: Metalabels are groups of people working under a common identity for a common purpose with a focus on releases — distinct public works that communicate and manifest their goals. Indie record labels, the Whole Earth Catalog, A24, and MSCHF are all examples of metalabels.

Metalabels are all about the vibe which frees them up from being product-driven.

defining metalabels in what they aren’t: they don’t have HR departments. They don’t have accounts receivable. They definitely don’t have Proper Lawyers

What do they have, if they don’t have those things? They use a bunch of APIs.

so they use Stripe and insert-startup-du-jour that makes it easy to put your brand – your metalabel – on OEM, own-brand, white-labeled atoms. (DTC)

So you can boringly describe them as Virtual Brands that do dropshipping or are likely to hold no inventory, are on-demand and a bit like fast fashion but not quite.

maybe in retrospect because metalabels have tended to be collectives – metalabels tend to be faceless and are definitely more about the vibe (sorry, that word’s going to come up a lot) and Definitely Not about a personality. Which made me wonder if they’re a reaction to Peak Influencer.

They’re ephemeral. Again, at least, this is the vibe (sigh) that I get, that they’re not intended really to turn into large businesses that scale? (Pop-up?)

In group discussion someone asked (reasonably!) what the deal with vibes were and the answer was pretty much a wide/aggregate consciousness, which ends up being the zeitgeist

But then, is this whole vibe thing different from the zeitgeist? I mean, kind of? It’s internet-disrupted-zeitgeist, which means things like faster, more democratic, more bottom-up and most crucially I think shattered.

Sure there’s probably money in metalabels but if you’re eg a16z then there’s always more money in being the middle layer: the API for example that metalabels use to Get Things Done

And if you go down that route, there’ll be something like Adobe For Metalabels

Oh, re influencers: “if you see a ringlight, then it’s not a metalabel”.

outfits/consultancies that report on candidates for Established Institutional Companies to turn into their own in-house metalabels, “outputs are small, influence is large”

brands with drama built-in. And if there are characters (remember: one characteristic/axis of metalabelness might be an identifiable real world person as a face/focus), then they’re fictional or constructs. Max Headroom as proto-metalabel?

Apr11: What is a metalabel?

until relatively recently, record labels — and especially independent record labels — occupied a much more influential position in the zeitgeist. In the years before streaming became the de facto mode of discovery, one could argue that they served as a sort of organizing principle for musical knowledge, crystallizing scenes and movements under a recognizable banner

In the platform era, that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself, and being able to benefit from the support of a community that has your back, can be increasingly hard to come by. Which is why Yancey Strickler, a former music journalist and the co-founder of Kickstarter and The Creative Independent, had something of a eureka moment recently while revisiting Michael Azerrad’s groundbreaking chronicle of the 1980s punk and indie scenes, Our Band Could Be Your Life: What if, instead of operating like independent economic agents, vying for our attention, streams, and clicks, artists squadded up and released work together? (United Artists)

Before long, Strickler had teamed up with some friends to start Metalabel, an organization that describes itself as a “growing universe of knowledge, resources, and tools that inspire creative collaboration, cooperation, and mutual support.”

like Other Internet’s “Squad Wealth” article and Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon’s “Interdependence” idea before it, the Metalabel concept offers some useful language for describing a paradigm shift that is clearly already underway. You can see it in how independent artists are teaming up to form DAOs, or media pundits hyping up the so-called “great rebundling.”

Today, we’re excited to welcome Yancy and Austin — one of the brains behind the digital musicians’ cooperative Ampled, as well as Unnamed Fund and Dinner DAO — onto the show. We discuss what The Whole Earth Catalog, the creative studio MSCHF, and the centuries-old science academy The Royal Society of London have in common (hint: our guests say they are all examples of a metalabel), Yancey’s “Dark Forest Theory of the Internet,” and how trying to keep up with the constant churn of content warps our priorities and values as creative people.