Metalabels

The Big Idea

Metalabel is a social network, music discovery engine, and online music store exclusively for independent artists and labels. We wondered how to make music discovery more effective and enjoyable, and we came up with metalabels.

We encourage all members of the site, from regular users to artists and independent labels, to create their own metalabels (here’s how). In doing so, members embody their own preferences in this group, which has its own musical aesthetic, and other members learn in this way what path they would like to travel in their music discovery.

Artist-created metalabels is where this participatory, “meta” level of music discovery really comes into its own: by creating a metalabel, an artist is granting his or her seal of approval to artists he or she has selected as peers. This carries a lot of weight, because if your favorite has favorites, you'll definitely want to check them out.

So, the principle behind metalabels is the same as that behind concert touring: most artists tour with a group, in which the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This approach is entirely unique to Metalabel, because every other social music site, every other social network, every other online music store, keeps individual artists isolated to their own pages and sites. There is no way to navigate collectivities and aesthetic complexes, and—let’s face it—an infinity of individual pages is no easier to navigate on MySpace than it is on the entire World Wide Web, where every band may also have a website of its own.

We think that this is the first time social networking technology has been used to create a network with a purpose, a network that is not composed of who or what you already know, a network that can actually grow, because it has a reason for being other than to be a static reflection of what you already are, already like, already know. Welcome to Metalabel!