Yancey Strickler

My first thought was I've never felt like I belonged anywhere.

Well, I think it always helps, even when people are opposing you, I think it helps to empathize.

Because I think everyone, generally, people are operating rationally within their local maximum.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes, yes, yes.

But can you change that?

Yeah.

And it works best if you can crawl into someone's bubble with them and look into the world together.

And by the time you're done talking, it's move forward eight steps.

And, like, people are open to that, I think, in certain circumstances.

But we all, we're all resistant to being wrong because that means changing, you know, changing means that we were wrong or had to move.

Like I grew up in the country on a farm.

So, like, those are gentle things to do.

But, yeah, I mean, the Artist Corporation idea is, it's, well, first, it's just teaching me more about how the universe works.

And,

I previously co-founded Kickstarter.

And the last time a new corporate structure was made in the United States was 2012.

I loved books.

And it was a public benefit corporation structure.

And Kickstarter was one of the first companies to become one of those.

And so we closely followed as the process was happening, as it was being passed as law and states, and yeah, just had a bit of an inside view into that.

I didn't, you know, just it wasn't how, what am I doing here?

And it just registered to me that it was very technical and very esoteric, but like...

It happened.

It happened kind of because it is so technical and esoteric.

It's just, it operates at a very different frequency than other things we're aware of.

And so I just happened to have seen that before.

And then when I personally ran into a wall with something I wanted to do and felt like I wasn't clear what option to take, some part of my brain remembered, hey, there's that thing.

And that always created kind of a hyper awareness.

And just, oh, could you do that thing on that thing?

Could you add that to that?

And I have the blessing of experience.

that I feel grateful for every day.

And the blessing experience lets you know how to roll with those things sometimes.

And so this idea and feeling arrived at like my most capable moment as a human being until now.

Until now.

And arrived with me being fortunate to know so many great people who could help with so many things of this I don't understand.

Do you, I feel like the vibe, the mood in the world right now is quite doomy.

Another word is anxiety.

It's tough.

It's doom.

Yeah.

Are you an optimistic person?

Does that get you down?

Another word, you know, but just a feeling of not totally fitting in.

Do you see over it?

And I've never really been a part of any,

institution I've never been really blessed by.

There's a lot of noise.

A lot of noise.

But how do you navigate according to truth?

Yeah.

It's a conscious mindset, I think, a little bit of some intentionality and not allowing yourself to just be pulled by what you see.

I think this is probably all of our time.

I mean, this TED, this stage is certainly an amazing exception, very excited about.

But I've just never had the option to be part of those things.

You know, I went to a high school in the middle of nowhere, very rural area.

I didn't, yeah, I don't have no connections.

Like, so just those things are not for me.

And so anything I've done, it's always been, I have to figure out what's my weird way.

And I'm again, that not belonging causes me to be off often very self-aware of what I'm doing.

And so I'm like doing something while having some understanding and maybe why I'm doing it.

And through that, like a deepening, I don't know, this is like retrospectively I'm saying this is what's happening.

Um, and so.

So I would say it's because I don't have a choice.

I would also say it's often annoying.

Like as a kid, I just wanted to fit in.

I just wanted to fit in.

I remember one year before like seventh grade, my mom and I go in the mall and I'm just like, let's only buy the clothes that I know the other kids who I'm not like wear.

And I went to school wearing those clothes and it's like, they still could tell.

What?

What a ripoff.

And so, you know, but as you learn how to be yourself, you know, I think the things that hold you back when you're younger are your strengths when you're older.

And so it's just now it's just kind of just how I, it's like my gate, you know, it's how I walk.

And it's often annoying.

I think anytime you're having to like, whether you want to or not confront some obstacle or overcome, you know, I'm left-handed and I'm having to learn guitar or whatever.

There's like all kinds, like so many things, but like that,

that extra step deepens your, way deepens your understanding of that thing.

And ultimately I think like really accelerates the exceptional, like your ceiling even.

In a way that again, if you're just like following

following the path, doing the right things, you arrive at like, oh, you're a professional.

But yet someone else might be the entrepreneur that like, yeah, you're the SVP at a big company, but they have made their own company.

And I think a lot of it is like, yeah, that... I mean it the opposite of this way, but some people come out wrong.

Like, I came out wrong.

You know?

But like...

but then you just force your way through the world.

And that process really teaches you, I think, ways that the world works, which is something you are dealing with these days.

How did this thing you're doing start even?

You're going to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I think basically all my work always starts with, uh, like why Yancy sad and just like a dumb self interrogation.

And for me it was, uh, like I'm a writer and I was building an audience.

I was running a community and doing a lot of stuff and having success with it.

And I felt very lonely all the time.

and tried to elevate people to be a part of it with me and just never, the dynamics were off.

And yeah, I just felt unhappy.

I was doing what I loved and I felt unhappy doing it.

And I ended up just like pausing for a bit, like for a month and I just read a lot.

That's what I do.

I just read, I read old and random.

And I read two things in the same week, one about history of hardcore and punk bands, which is my world, and how in all cases, they made such weird music, no record label would put them out, so they had to put themselves out.

But to put themselves out, they just made up a fake record label name, a logo, and a PO box.

And you print it, and then you self-legitimize.

But what always happened is by the time the first record would come out, like four other people would come and be like, we make music like you, can we be part of it too?

And it made me see that something like a punk label is not just putting out music, it's manifesting more punkness.

It's teaching people the worldview, how to adopt it.

And that same week I was learning about the history of the Royal Society.

It began in 1660 in London.

Christopher Wren and other natural law scientists start meeting at a pub on Thursday nights because they're annoyed that facts are determined by the church and the king.

So they start a club with the motto of take nobody's word for it.

And in 1664, they published the first zine, Philosophical Transactions, which is people just trying experiments, experimenting with the idea of experiments.

And those pages is like Funded the Babbage Machine, where Isaac Newton published, Benjamin Franklin's Kite Experiment, peer review, scientific method, all created through that process.

I came to feel like those two projects, a punk label and the Royal Society are the same thing.

It is, yeah.

It is an umbrella.

It is some organization that stands for a purpose.

It is open to anyone who reflects the criteria and promotes that same purpose.

And there's like some sort of economic or rules that determine how it functions together.

But I came to see that like...

Across history, that's been the most powerful form of culture creation ever.

But yeah, but I ended up like had that observation and wrote it up for myself and I wasn't sure what to do about it.

And I ended up sending it to like five people who I thought about when writing it who are people who run projects like this.

Some of them I knew.

Some of them I didn't.

And I reached out and I had just attached a Google Doc.

And I said, hey, I'm working on this thing.

It's not public.

But I wrote this while thinking of you.

And really curious to know what you think.

And all five people wrote back.

And all five had some reaction of like, wow, I've never thought of it this, I've never seen this meta, I've never seen this thing.

And that feedback sort of fed that this is real.

And that process led to the, ultimately to seeing

to building a tool for that sort of project to exist today, and then to imagine how those sorts of projects could legally become powerful, could become wealthy, could become bigger than how we think of an artist's role today.

But like, it really did begin with

uh, just trying to understand my own unhappiness with the situation that was to my liking.

I'd made the situation I wanted, but I did not enjoy it.

And trying to figure that out for myself has just led to, well, you know, uh, in my, in the talk I gave, I talk about how I'm starting Kickstarter.

There had been a wall and we built a door.

And that had been in the talk for a while.

And about a month ago, I was reading The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is a book by Joseph Campbell.

And this is where the hero's journey idea comes from.

The hero's journey is you kind of get the shit kicked out of you.

You're called to return.

You deny it.

You don't want it.

You have to go deeper.

You go deeper.

And then you return.

And the pivotal moment is that you find transcendence.

And across every society myth, it has a similar sort of shape to the story.

But the trick to transcendence, transcendence is a door.

And the door of transcendence is all around us.

There's like 12 right here between us right now.

The doors of transcendence are everywhere.

But there's a trick to doors of transcendence.

Doors of transcendence are locked in very specific ways.

And he writes that the doors of transcendence are always locked by opposites.

Light and dark.

Life and death.

Or as I saw when I read it, artist corporation.

Exact opposites.

But opposites lead you to think that there is no space between them.

But in the hero's journey, because you've gotten the shit kicked out of you and because you'd like to see it differently now, you perceive the crack.

And the final stage of the hero's journey is to identify that.

And by identifying the doors and opening them and returning and telling people, you open the doors for everybody.

And that is the point of the journey.

But it's always locked by these opposites.

And it's like,

Yeah, that's the deepest truths.

The grandest things are in finding our way to that hidden door.

And again, it's just like the glory of the universe, the trick of the whole, it's all in chorus with itself.

It's harmonizing with itself.

And these things just give us a hint of what's actually at play.

But there is a mix of like, it's an honor and it's a responsibility and it's a duty.

And there's a lot of feelings that go into it.

And learning about what you are doing, I'm thinking, oh, what a great, wow, everybody's gonna love this.

Like, what a great thing.

And then to hear you have opposition.

There are forces that oppose this.

There are maybe people don't care.

You know, maybe,

the world you see is very hard for someone else to see.

Yes.

And yeah, how do you carry that?

In recent years, some of Spotify's most prominent playlists have seen real songs by real artists replaced with ghost songs by ghost artists.

Real songs have to be paid real royalties.

Ghost songs don't.

Something like this dynamic is playing out across every creative industry.

Maximize profits by minimizing creator compensation.

Now add AI, and the ghost artist doesn't even have to be human anymore.

A future of art without artists.

Now, I'm not an expert on AI, but I have spent the last 25 years working as a creative person and making tools for creative people.

I'm the son of a musician, and my career began writing about music for Pitchfork and The Village Voice.

I started a tiny record label, and I'm one of the co-founders of Kickstarter, which gave creative people a way to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the public with their projects.

Before Kickstarter, so many amazing projects had no chance to exist because they didn't fit some preexisting business model.

After Kickstarter, millions of people have exchanged billions of dollars in support of new ideas.

Where there was a wall, we built a door.

But despite what you hear about the creator economy, the reality for most creative people is stark.

It's estimated that 85 percent of visual artists make less than $25,000 a year, and that just 13 percent of creative people earn a full-time living from their work.

So we're not talking about aristocrats and rock stars.

We're talking about people working hard, trying to make a living by doing what comes natural to them.

a musician, a craftsperson, a community theater director, a potter.

Millions of people who are our friends, our family, our neighbors, who inspire us, and millions more people, too.

But despite being so central to how we experience life, we don't make things easy for these folks.

There's no automatic health care, there's no retirement benefits, there's no path to collective wealth at all.

They're entirely on their own.

In a world of global capitalism, creative people operate like 18th-century traveling peddlers, moving from village to village and project to project, trying to piece together a living.

So there's something missing here, a way for creative people to get access to the basics and be a part of something bigger than just them on their own.

And I personally really struggled with this a few years ago.

I was grinding away in the creator economy and getting lonelier by the second.

The people most like me were my biggest competition.

It left me constantly on edge and burnt out and alone.

Eventually, I got so frustrated, I started a new project to help creative people release work together.

It's called MetaLabel.

And one of the first releases was by myself and 10 other writers who'd all independently written about the same subject.

So I reached out to these people who I didn't know, and I proposed a way that we would work together.

We would publish our pieces together in a book, and the initial sales would go back to paying the cost of making it.

After that, 70 percent of the profits would be split equally among us, and 30 percent would go into a shared treasury that we could use for a future project if things went well.

Everyone agreed, and we became the Dark Forest Collective.

And now, a year later, we've sold 2,000 copies of this book.

More than $70,000 has automatically flowed through our arrangement.

And just now, we published our second book by another author, even better than the first.

And our little collective is going to make six figures, which is wild.

But then I realized it was kind of silly to be so legally YOLO about this, and so I should create some sort of structure to represent what we were doing.

And I was surprised to find there wasn't an obvious fit.

We could be an LLC, but that just puts a shield over the project.

It doesn't help you grow the pie or share it.

We could be a C corporation, but then you're taxed twice and you have all sorts of overhead.

You could be a nonprofit and then be wrapped in red tape.

So I started thinking, what if you could create a new structure for a project like ours?

So I reached out to a trusted colleague, and soon we were speaking to experts in making new corporate forms.

And for the last year, a small team of us have been working together, digging into this question.

And I'm here representing our work because we've come up with something.

A new structure for creative work.

We call it the Artists Corporation, or A Corp.

Now, I realize that a new corporate structure sounds like the last thing creative people need.

And that these two words are the exact opposite of each other.

But the A Corp just might be the door that opens up a new path to prosperity for creative people.

You can think of an A Corp as like a company, but built for how creative people work.

And we can imagine a band starts, and right from the beginning, they have an A Corp.

So they're not just five individuals, they're people who collectively own an organization that has the power to own their intellectual property, their gear, their business.

As they start to get paid, that money can automatically flow to each of the members according to preset amounts, and they could even set aside money to be saved for future projects in a treasury, or pooling together with other artist corporations to get better health care or other benefits.

As an artist corporation, they would also be able to receive both commercial revenue as well as nonprofit sources of funding.

And if a label or a bigger commercial entity came along, rather than just selling the rights to their intellectual property, which has been customary until now, as an artist corporation, they can issue shares.

So instead, that entity would make an investment in the artist corporation, allowing it to be valued more highly and everyone to benefit if things went well.

Now, these are simple things for many businesses to do, but they're very hard for creative people to do.

but artist corporations will take these same capabilities and put them in the hands of the entire creative community.

And creative people are already leaders and entrepreneurs, we just don't think of them that way.

The painter Mike Kelly once said, I started out an anarchist and a hippie, and now I'm an entrepreneur with 15 employees.

Look at Tyler, the creator, teenage hip-hop phenom turned fashion impresario and now world builder.

or Dolly Parton, who turned her incredible talent and fame into a whole world of businesses and even a theme park that celebrates where she comes from in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.

Now, these are people at the top of their game who use their agency to take these bigger risks.

But what if you didn't have to be in the 1 percent to get that chance?

What if these sort of tools and self-determination were part of every artist's kit?

So this is not a government handout, this is not a charity, this is not a special favor, this is the exact opposite.

Right now, creative people are excluded from the full benefits of capitalism.

Artist corporations will treat them as real economic actors for the first time.

Creating a consistent structure for how we value creative work is going to cause a revolution in how these industries operate, and it's going to bring more money into the space than we've ever seen before.

A lot of it coming from fans who just want to support the world they want to see and won't be looking for a big financial return.

Other people will, and I fully expect venture capital for artists and creators to become a real thing.

And to be honest, this is where I start to get nervous.

but then I remember the way things are now, and that in the past, artists have had to answer to the church, the kings, the aristocracy, wealthy patrons, network executives, now corporate algorithms.

So if you want to understand how challenging the future could be for creative people, just look at what's happening with musicians right now.

But artist corporations finally give us our own seat at the table.

To make this a reality, we're following an established path for making new corporate forms, and we have people on our team who have successfully done this before.

A lot of this work will be happening in public,

building a coalition of artists, creators, fans, investors, politicians, all people who believe that artist corporations are a good thing for everybody.

Because this isn't anti-tech, this isn't anti-AI.

This is about what type of world we want to live in.

One where we rent access to corporate-controlled, AI-generated platforms,

or one where our creative and cultural institutions are owned by the people who made them.

If we keep artists powerless, the options are just going to get more and more limited.

But if we allow them to be more than just individuals, whole new possibilities await.

The next Disney won't be started by AI or some traditional company.

Up until the late 90s, people either listened to music for free on the radio or by buying a physical copy to listen to at home.

It'll start as an artist corporation, a creative vision brought to life by a person or group of people that changes how the rest of us see the world.

Artists don't need pity.

Artists need power.

And together, we're going to build it.

Thank you.

But then the internet happened, and now Spotify and other streaming services give us access to an infinite catalog of music.

We don't own anything, but we can rent pretty much all of it.

So people pay less money, which means musicians make less money, but the platforms make a lot of money.

Recently, researchers have discovered a new type of song on Spotify, a ghost song by a ghost artist.

These are unnamed, uncredited musicians who are paid to make music that sounds like what the Spotify algorithm says people want to hear.