Chappell Roan’s Grammy speech and the need for creative agency
The right comment from the right person in the right venue can completely change a conversation.
That’s what’s happened this week when pop star Chappell Roan did something unexpected during her Grammy’s speech on Sunday: she told an uncomfortable truth.
I told myself if I ever won a Grammy and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and health care, especially to developing artists.
“Because I got signed so young… when I got dropped I had zero job experience under my belt, and like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic and could not afford health insurance. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system and so dehumanized to not have health care. If my label would have prioritized artists’ health, I would have been provided care by a company I was giving everything to. So record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance protection. Labels, we got you, but do you got us?
She’s absolutely right. Though artists of all kinds are celebrated on-stage and on-screen, they have little social stability or economic foundation off it. In a world of global corporations, artists and creative people are 1099 NPCs with limited power and agency of their own.
The most significant new financial tools for artists in recent decades have been patronage (crowdfunding) and subscriptions — basic instruments that have existed for centuries yet felt revolutionary because so few financial tools exist for artists.
Roan challenges labels and all creative institutions to support the artists on whose shoulders their empires rest. Despite her valiant words on an important stage, it’s unlikely to move the needle. The system isn’t going to change itself.
The path forward isn’t one where we as creative people continue to rely on outside institutions to provide for us. Only a tiny percentage of us even get that chance. The path forward is one where creative people make new institutions of our own.
It’s this goal, more than anything else, that is the mission of Metalabel. To make a new structure that creative people can use to build something bigger than themselves.
Many components of this vision exist today in Metalabel: infrastructure for creative people to fluidly come together in small groups around shared visions. Professional release tools that preserve independence. Transparent shared finances that keep artists and creators in control.
In just a few months we’ll introduce our most significant release to date. One that speaks directly to the issues Roan raises, and that introduces a truly new path forward for all creative people — on Metalabel and off.
A minority of respondents in our Anonymous Creative Futures survey thought it would be better to be an artist in 2025 than in years past. Things feel dark for artists right now. We face many threats and the allies feel few.
But it’s in the pressure of darkness that we find the light.
We’re not without hope. We just need direction. A new creative era awaits. We’re going to build it together, step by step.
Metalabel makes creative people more powerful
Fluidly come together in small groups around shared visions
Access professional release tools that preserve your creative independence
Transparent shared finances that keep artists and creators in control
A new creative era built by all of us, for all of us.
NEW RELEASES
Art and Design Objects
Traceloops, Faceloops Flipbook Blind Boxes
As active members of the fanclub for Traceloops, the Brooklyn-based animator and visual artist who makes distinct flipbooks and stop-motion animations, we cannot begin to describe the euphoria this latest release has wrought on us. Following up on last year’s incredible Cut-out Flipbook (of which only a few editions remain), this release by Traceloop offers a single, group, or whole set of miniature flipbooks whose pages show dancing, melting, and conjoining faces rendered in beautiful, moving black-and-white ink drawings. Like all Traceloops work, the experience is very physical, as collectors rip open the small envelope containing the pieces (satisfaction level: EXTREME), then feel their faces turn to delight as they flip the pages back and forth. Can you tell we’re collectors ourselves? And that Traceloops hand-delivered our edition to us last week? And that it’s awesome? This release is so special we don’t even know what to tell you. Sets start at just $15. Not many available.
Michael J Sclafani, Arrow Sculpture
Arrow Sculpture is a series of unique sculptures by the NYC-based artist Michael J. Sclafani that pair striking colors with a distinctive shape to sculpt objects that resemble both flowers and arrows — a line the piece willingly blurs, as thorns dot the arrow/flower’s shaft. Are they a gift from the soil or a threat from afar that just missed? Depends on who you gift them to.
Reza Hosni, Cosmic Crumbs Bag
Reza Hasni is a Berlin-based, Singapore-born artist and designer whose work spans textiles, visual art, animation, and whose subjects bridge the digital, the symbolic, and the sacred. In their first release on Metalabel, Hasni releases “Cosmic Crumbs Bag,” a wearable and utilitarian piece of art in the form of a lightweight, colorful, and cleverly packable tote bag that hits all the right notes. Choice!
PRINT MEDIA
[Dis]enchantment: A zine about Esoteric AI by AIxDESIGN & internet teapot (Slow AI Series)
AI this, AI that. These days we all throw around those letters as a shorthand for a whole host of things — the marvels of technology, the potential for societal collapse, the lingering question of whether humankind is being surpassed. Ya know, normal stuff. What we love about this new print and digital zine from AIxDESIGN, a team and community of technologists and researchers, is that it thoughtfully unpacks our experiences with AI and connects them to longer traditions of how humans have sought the perspective of oracles, shamans, and other spiritual mediums. Fresh and inspired.
Anonymous Creative Futures Report
Here we go again. The Anonymous Creative Futures Report is our latest release, a deep dive into the creative ecosystem and universe as it exists now, and an unflinching look at what it may be. We’re grateful to the hundreds of collectors who have picked up a copy so far (and to the great crew who came to our space in NYC last Friday night to celebrate). Even cooler: all money raised from this release will be split among the 75 contributors, putting our money where our vision is. For those looking to go deeper into Chappell Roan’s feelings, this is a good place to start.
Collect Anonymous Creative Futures Report
DIGITAL MEDIA
⋆ ˜҈ Breathing in, Breathing out ⋆⁎⁺ Guided Meditation ✧
Super yes to cataloguing and dropping a meditation as a release. This inspired piece by Mind Meditations, a project by sound artist Aamina Simone, opens up the listener to the vast expanses and universes all around and within us. Why limit ourselves when we’re actually limitless?
A New Creative Era
Back in 2023, Metalabel released this zine in a newspaper box in New York City’s Lower East Side, laying out our vision for the future we want, and discovering a new friend — the triple-smiled happy face, or Smiley, as we later learned they were named — along the way. This text and piece came together in an instant, the words, images, and ways of seeing flowing from us without effort, as if called from Another Place. Two years later these ideas continue to inspire us. This is the future we want to build, together.
Thank you as always for reading and being part of this project.
Love to you all,
Metalabel
She is fearless!
Inspiring article. Huge fan of what you guys are doing (and thanks for "giving away" the Eno book! Hope you'll be able to stay pure and not go where the self-optimization industry is going...