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Remember when being a music fan meant falling in love with a label and collecting every single release? Today we’re going to be talking about labels, and the special role they play in the creator economy — past, present, and future.
These days, when you hear about record labels, it’s usually in the context of a high-profile artist going on social media to speak out about being locked into a terrible deal, or some jaw-dropping headline about how the majors are generating a million dollars of streaming revenue in an hour as artists struggle to make rent.
But until relatively recently, record labels — and especially independent record labels — occupied a much more influential position in the zeitgeist. In the years before streaming became the de facto mode of discovery, one could argue that they served as a sort of organizing principle for musical knowledge, crystallizing scenes and movements under …
