Why Artist Corporations?
It’s recently dawned on me that I’ve spent most of my life working on the same problem: how to get creative people more power. This is especially the case with a new project I introduced at TED earlier this year that went online last week.
Watch the ten-minute talk:
Artist Corporations are a new structure that turns 1099 gig-workers into owners. This is the story of where this project came from and what it may one day do for you.
Beginnings
I grew up in an old farmhouse in the Appalachian Mountains far from other kids. I spent my days dreaming of the outside world.
Music and books showed me the way. I read obsessively. I started a Beach Boys fan club and enlisted my cousins as members. I wrote a fantasy series in black-and-white composition books. I made music with friends. Creative expression let me experiment and discover who I could be.
After college I made it to New York City. I began hacking together a living writing about music and culture. I saw tons of shows. I started a tiny record label putting out music from bands I loved. I was always broke, but it was fun.
Around this time I made a new friend — Perry Chen — who’d been working on the idea for what would come to be called Kickstarter. The project answered a problem we and cofounder Charles Adler knew well: how hard it was to fund creative projects. People had to wait in line for a limited number of funding opportunities. The few that existed went to insiders and people already connected. That was not us.
Where there had been a wall, Kickstarter built a door: a path for anyone to go straight to the public to get support for their ideas. But we had to stretch beyond our comfort zone to do it. My obsessions were music, movies, books, creative culture. Business and the world of money were uncomfortably alien.
I remember regularly feeling like a traitor. The wall between art and business was towering and unquestioned. Creative people didn’t do what we were doing. I gave myself a crash course, reading and learning whatever I could to better understand what it would take to make the idea real.
Once the platform launched and started to grow, we wanted to chart a course other creative people could follow. We became one of the first Public Benefit Corporations as a way of expressing our distaste for business-as-usual.
In 2013, a study out of Wharton found that Kickstarter projects had already created 300,000 full-time and part-time jobs. A decade later, it could be more than a million. Nearly $9 billion has gone to creative projects through the site since it launched 16 years ago.
Burnout
In 2017 I stepped down as Kickstarter’s CEO and became a full-time creative person for the first time in a decade. The transition wasn’t easy. I was writing a book exploring the history of financial value and self-interest (This Could Be Our Future), and starting to work as a full-time creator.
When I looked at my own behavior, I realized I was more reticent to express my true feelings on the internet than I’d ever been before. I was instead sharing my true thoughts in private group chats where it felt safer to be my real self. I sent to this list (then on TinyLetter) a piece called “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet” that soon went nerd-viral, kicking off a still-going discussion of how we relate and gather online.
The Dark Forest was more than theory, it was a lived experience. My book led to the creation of a community (the Bento Society) and soon I was teaching hundreds of people around the world a new lens for understanding their self-interest. For more than a year I created space for this community. Many people and parts I loved (hi Spirit Gym <3). But I was also at the top of an audience hierarchy that too often had me feeling depressingly on my own.
Eventually I burned out and flipped the table over. I couldn’t keep doing it this way.
Artist power
My loneliness caused me to look everywhere for answers. I thought about Dark Forests and started working on a project imagining a society in its image (“The Post-Individual”). But I was also thinking about my own life: how could I feel more connected to others?
I re-read the book Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerad and was inspired by how punk and hardcore bands took charge of their careers. Spurned by traditional record labels, they started indie labels of their own. That step gave their work power. Their music wasn’t just about them. It was an invitation for others to do the same — even under the same banner.
That same week I came across a very different story with similar dynamics: the origins of the Royal Society. A group of academics fed up with facts being determined by the church and king in 1660s London began meeting each week. They decided to form a club with the motto “take nobody’s word for it.” Their meetings led to the publication of one of the first zines, Philosophical Transactions, where the foundations of science were iteratively established, and which still publishes 350+ years later. (And you thought your weekly newsletter cadence was worth bragging about…)
Punk rock and modern science are polar opposites, yet their evolutions are strikingly similar: a group of people with a shared worldview releasing work under the same banner that built a larger cultural movement and influence. I wrote up my observations in a Google Doc I circulated to friends. Soon I was talking with a small group of people about the idea. By the end of that year, a team of us were trying to turn it into action.
That project became Metalabel, an operating system for creative people to start internet-native versions of the institutions I observed in the past. I’ve now come to see our work as creating groupcore software: tools that create a counterbalance to the lonely economy logic that’s tilted us away from each other for their profit, rather than towards each other to be part of something bigger together.
As part of the first groups, I instantly found the experience more rewarding. I was part of something. I felt more connected. It was easy to imagine how and why others would too.
Artist Corporations
The farther I’ve gone into this journey, the bigger the challenges and opportunities seem. One day while thinking about legal structures (not a normal thing for me), a next step appeared. A way for artists and creators to:
Become more than 1099 gig workers
Be entrepreneurs, owners, and stewards of their practices
Create more economic security
Access better health care
Protect their intellectual property and creative work
Build wealth on their own and with others
How could this happen? By following an unlikely path and making a new corporate form: the Artist Corporation, or A-Corp.
Imagine four photographers who come together to form an A-Corp. They share studio expenses, pool income from client work, split profits, and jointly own a growing archive of images. They each also have individual A-Corps to hold work made outside the group. They accept donations for documentary projects while also raising investment to expand. By year two they’re earning enough to get a better health care plan. All under one legal structure designed for creative people.
The Artist Corporation is a new foundation for building equity through creative work. A structure that would include creative people in the greatest benefits of capitalism (collective wealth creation) for arguably the first time ever.
But how?
To make new corporate forms means passing laws at the state level. The same thing I saw Public Benefit Corporations do. When I first had the idea, I reached out to an old friend, and soon we were working with world-class experts in corporate structure, designing a new foundation for creative value while talking to artists and creators about what they need too. (A process that’s still underway.)
Later this summer we’ll publish the full details of our proposal and how to get there. We believe very much in our work and see a path for making it a reality.
And momentum is building. Since the TED talk went up last week, more than 1,000 artists and creators have already signed up.
Join the 1,200+ artists who want to be an A-Corp.
Why now?
This is obvious to creative people, but saying it out loud: platforms monetize creative work while leaving artists and creators isolated and under-resourced. This is the status quo we’re in now.
The demands for content keep increasing. The support systems keep decreasing. New tools like AI are both exciting opportunities and existential threats to our livelihoods. In other words, this is a critical moment for people to claim agency and ownership of their work.
Today 48% of Americans personally report having a creative practice (48%!!). More kids want to be creators than any profession. Creative culture is no longer the sideshow — it’s the main act. The time is right to level things up and for creative people to have their Adam Smith moment.
The Creative Century
All of this adds up to a new era: the Creative Century. A period when creative people become more powerful and resourced than ever before.
To get there we need structures under our control. That’s what A-Corps can be: a new legal and economic foundation for creative people to collaborate, protect their work, and build wealth together.
Nearly half of Americans identify as creative people. We aren’t niche. Artist Corporations will give half of America power and a stronger voice in their creative careers and practices. A shift so significant we might feel it more widely: a world less purely utilitarian, less purely economic, and richer in meaning, connection, and possibility as the values of art and creativity filter through society.
My life, I now realize, has always been in service to this dream. It started with looking for my place in the world. In many ways that’s still what it is. Except now it’s not just me. It’s a whole movement of people working to transform our lives and the lives of generations to come.
Whether this work succeeds or falls short, just know: this is for all of us.
Peace and love,
Yancey
ARTIST CORPORATIONS: A new business entity that turns artists and creators from 1099 gig workers to owners. Artist Corporations let a group (or solo artist) keep full control of their intellectual property and creative output while pooling income, sharing equity, and qualifying for both donations and investment under one flexible, legally recognized structure. Learn more.
HOW TO HELP: Want to help make Artist Corporations real? Sign up and add your voice here. Together we can build the Creative Century.
This is an interesting topic for me. One particular aspect of interest is corporations as a mechanism for socially and politically acceptable economic redistribution. Corporate employee A may be 5-10 times as productive as corporate employee B doing the same work and having the same title, but corporations typically don't pay A five-to-ten times as much as B.
However, artists as atomized individuals in a competitive market are subject to log-normal/power law dynamics, so artist B being 5-10 times as good as artist B at the same artistic endeavors can translate to multiple orders of magnitude differences in monetary rewards. We see this on Patreon, for example. (I've done detailed data analysis of this.) But put A and B in the same corporation and we'd likely see the same compression of differential rewards we see in traditional corporations.
Of course, that raises the question, why wouldn't the most productive and successful artists defect from the corporate structure, if they can make 10x/100x/1000x out on their own? That would probably happen in many cases (after all, we see lots of bands break up and their key members go solo). I don't know the complete answer to mitigating this, but maybe it would be a combination of artistic solidarity and fellow-feeling (e.g., being part of a "scenius"), hedging against failure in an environment where hits are uncertain and to some extent non-repeatable, and other factors I'm not thinking of right now..
In any case, I'm really looking forward to seeing the "artist corporation" idea fleshed out.
This is such a smart and exciting idea. I’m all in.