Meet the Founders
Amiri Barksdale
Amiri Kudura Barksdale was born in South Central, Los Angeles, in 1974. He moved with his mother and baby brother to Houston, Texas, in 1982. He attended public schools in Houston, and went to Dartmouth College to study religion, politics, and philosophy in 1992. Amiri paints and writes to music, and he has loved hip-hop since hearing the very first lines of the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight", one sunny day in East Oakland, in 1981. The chicken still tastes like wood. He has loved jazz since he heard his first real jazz album—Miles Davis's Nefertiti—in 1989 (it was a present from Deon Warner). He loved jazz before hearing the real thing, too, but he won't say anything else about that.
Ryann Scypion
Ryann Scypion was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and grew up in Houston, Texas. She was raised on rock, new wave, and hiphop. Ryann is a graduate of New York University where she studied black history. She is the co-founder, Chief Creative Officer, and Director of Marketing for Metalabel.
A Mission Statement of Sorts
If you've read our info page and our FAQ, you may find some things repeated here. Not many. But any is because they're so important they bear repeating!
We don't sell ads and we never will. We have no "partners" to satisfy. We have no venture capital investors to impress.
We therefore have no reason to spam you.
We sell music, not your eyeballs.
Social networking is a useful technology: the ability to create online communities of people with shared interests is a great thing.
But haven't you noticed that most social networks have no real purpose other than to sell you to advertisers? Haven't you noticed that e-mail is pretty much just as good as logging on to a huge network and finding your friends? Social networking as currently practiced is essentially a bulletin board with some privacy walls here and there.
The fact is that social networking is not an application in and of itself. Social networking is a tool in search of an application.
We're a social network for independent artists and music lovers.
We use this technology to create a hands-off and yet self-regulating market for music that we might not otherwise be able to hear because of the corruption of the record label-dominated music industry.
We say hands-off because we are Metalabel: that means beyond labels. We are not tastemakers or censors. We say self-regulating because the social network is our "ratings" system. Artists who we may hate still have fans. Those artists and those fans will connect on Metalabel. A fan may love an artist that we despise. That fan can still write about that artist, promote that artist, or anything else they choose.
That brings us to another major point.
We have no gimmicks.
There is no crazy pricing algorithm or fancy ad-revenue-sharing scheme. We're not trying to impress Wall Street, venture capitalists, record labels, other corporations, or any potential buyers with our ability to "price" popularity.
That would put us in the position of tastemakers.
That would mean we were selling something other than music to fans. That would mean we were selling "talent" to buyers of "talent."
That would make us yet another independent record label.
Think about this with me for a second: Let's say there's an independent artist who hasn't been able to get a record deal because a label thinks he or she is not commercial enough.
That artist may play gigs around town, across the country, or around the world, and may have accumulated a number of fans who really love what that artist does. But he or she just isn't as popular as, say, Justin Timberlake.
Let's say that artist comes across an online music business that sells music for independent artists. Great! But there's one catch: our artist can't sell at full price and receive full royalties. See, first that artist has to sell a certain arbitrary number of songs with that online business before they can get full price.
Our artist is basically being punished twice for their "noncommercial" music. Once by not being able to sign up with Sony or whomever, and a second time by an arrogant online music business who thinks artists will just take whatever they can get, including cut-rate prices and insults, because that online music business has venture capitalists to impress.
The artist cannot sell his or her songs at a reasonable price to those who want to buy them. The fans who want to support this artist cannot—not at 2 cents a song. What's the use?
Whatever the reason, it is not technically necessary, and it doesn't help anyone. Why can't the community rank the artists and…that's it? The ranking is then purely a matter of taste and artistic judgment. And the artists are able to sell what they are able to sell, at full price, without any additional penalty. There's already a low-volume penalty in being an unknown artist. Believe me, I know. Why on earth should there be a second penalty on price, at those still-low volumes? (I know all about that, too.) And why should this occur on the web of all places, where delivery entails negligible additional cost to the distributor? Even bricks-and-mortar music retailers attempting to get rid of slow-selling inventory don't drop their prices so low. Why do it on the Web?
We have a different approach:
We sell music to fans. We sell music for artists. We sell music to whatever fans that artist has. Period.
We sell songs for $1 each. The artist gets 80 percent.
That's it!
Our Story
Metalabel was conceived on a rainy April 18, 2007, in a café in New York City. We were tired of working 9–5 and having no stake in our work. We wanted more.
Because we both love music, at first we wanted to start a record label, but we realized that the way record labels work exploits the artists and their fans. We didn't want to have anything to do with exploiting anyone.
We figured out a way to have a music business without the exploitation. We could sell music on the Internet and build a real social network to promote the artists. We came home after a long day at work and began writing it up. A couple of days later, we went on vacation, but it turned out to be a working vacation: we finalized our business plan and decided to cut our two-week vacation in half, return home, and begin our business.
It took 9 months. Metalabel is our baby, our labor of love.
We hope you'll love it too, and we hope you will join today.