Most creative people will experience burnout at some point in their careers. It has become an all-too-common affliction. Like for many people, the moment came for Yancey Strickler during the pandemic, in May 2021. “I had been leading a community and was burnt out and feeling alone,” he says. In search of a reset, he took some much-needed time off.

Yancey was one of the original co-founders of Kickstarter, the pioneer of crowdfunding, and of The Creative Independent, a free resource of guidance for creative people. He is a writer by trade, started his career in journalism, and has spent his life surrounded by creative people. During this down time in 2021, he started thinking about what had led to his burnout, and noticed a subtle but insidious problem within the creative industries.

One of the main issues he saw was a “feeling of posting into the void,” as he puts it. “I’m putting all of this work into posting something, to try to get attention, to compete, and I’m never getting back anything like what I hoped,” he says. “But I never stopped chasing it until I burnt out.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The other problem Yancey found was more profound. “As a creative person, I felt alone,” he says.

Antisocial media

He puts a lot of the blame for this at the door of social media, in particular Instagram, which has encouraged these dynamics over the past decade. Clearly, Instagram isn’t all bad – after all, many creatives owe their success to the way the platform has allowed them to showcase their work and build communities of followers. But it has shifted since the early golden age, when Instagram resembled “a feed of other people like us, finding their way through life,” says Yancey.

Today, it has lost a lot of that authenticity and relatability. “We’re all huddled over looking at our feeds and we understand the scarcity of attention that’s there,” he adds. While we’re all partly complicit in this, platforms like Instagram have fuelled the fire with their engagement-seeking algorithms. And it has had a huge impact on our industry. “For most creative people,” Yancey says, “that makes you think: ‘Shit, do I need to do what they’re doing?’ And it sort of de-centres you from your own practice, and isolates us from each other.” When he finally stopped to reflect on all of this, he realised he had to find a “way out”.

New dynamics

Last year, Yancey launched Metalabel, a platform that aims to be “a new space to release and collect creative work” and which he hopes offers creatives that “way out”. At the heart of the platform is a distinction between posting and releasing. Where posting is generally something that you do alone, releasing on Metalabel can be a collaborative act – a release can have as many “creators” behind it as you want. The other important distinction is that Metalabel is a place to buy and sell creative work, and profit-sharing between a project’s creators is, as Yancey puts it, “trivially easy”.

Whereas posting is generally passive (you put something on Instagram and then you wait with bated breath to see if it finds an audience), releasing is “more of a movie premiere,” says Yancey. “There can be a build up to it. Someone has to pay money or share an email address to fully engage with it. It is a ceremonial exchange.

It’s a bold play. If Metalabel is successful, it could change the underlying dynamics of the creative industries. Rather than keeping us isolated, and forcing us to compete with one another for scarce attention, Yancey wants us to come together; to create better work; to celebrate that work; and to all earn more from our creative output.

Metalabel itself makes money by charging a 10% commission on sales, so it’s less interested in attention and more in quality releases that garner deep engagement from their communities. Also, there isn’t a tight definition of what a “release” can be – it can be anything from a game to a design object to a zine. For instance, songwriter, music producer and visual artist Brian Eno has released a book, What Art Does, through Metalabel, and it has sold “six figures’ worth of copies,” says Yancey. Other particularly popular categories are “design and art objects”, such as prints, candles and sculptures; “print media”, from novels to magazines; and “digital media”, including everything from plug-ins to Zip files. (In fact, the fastest-selling release ever on Metalabel, according to Yancey, is a digital download of Notion templates reflecting all the exercises in the book The Artist’s Way, which sold “well over 1,000 copies in just a couple of days, at five bucks a piece.”)

The future’s bright

Behind this bet is Yancey’s belief that the creative industries of the future are going to look quite different from today. For one, he’s confident that “passive royalties” will become a bigger part of how creatives support themselves financially, and Metalabel is creating “passive income for creative people” with the way that profits from a release can be easily shared. For another, he’s already witnessing how digital work is being valued differently, and Metalabel is promoting this with its ability to “release” Zip files, Notion templates and other digital creative work.

And then there is social media. Yancey believes that the advent of generative AI will spell the doom of social media as we know it today. “Any trust or faith that people have in social media is going to be made shakier,” he says. We’re already seeing how some of our more meaningful conversations are moving away from mainstream social media and towards more niche platforms like Bluesky and Cara, or even into closed online communities, including walled-off Discord and Slack channels. When it comes to releasing and selling creative work, Yancey believes Metalabel is already there to replace today’s “posting” culture.

Certainly, it’s a brighter, healthier future for creatives that Metalabel promises. Instead of being isolated individuals fighting for attention, Yancey wants to see creative people producing work together, celebrating work together, and thriving together. In 10 years’ time, he predicts, “I think the level of impact and influence that creative people have is going to be lightyears beyond what it is even now.” Well, here’s hoping he’s right.

Matt Alagiah | Writer and editor

Matt Alagiah is a London-based writer and editor, who until October was editor-in-chief of creative media company It’s Nice That. During his six years at the helm there, Matt led the team’s editorial output across the website, live events, podcasts and social channels, and hosted the brand’s flagship talks event Nicer Tuesdays in London and New York. Before joining It’s Nice That, he was executive editor at Monocle, where he mainly focused on the magazine’s coverage of business and entrepreneurship.