Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation | Yancey Strickler

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Streaming platforms, corporate gatekeepers, and now AI have eroded the power of artists. And today, creative people globally struggle to earn a living. Is it possible that an artist-powered revolution is on its way? For writer, entrepreneur, and former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, the answer is yes. In his talk, he shares his idea for a radical new legal structure, which he calls the Artist corporation that could give creators real economic and organizational power on their own terms.

0:47Coming up.

0:54So if you want to understand how challenging the future could be for creative people, just look at what's happening with musicians right now. 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. 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.

1:34These are unnamed, uncredited musicians who are paid to make music that sounds like what the Spotify algorithm says people want to hear. 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.

2:22I'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.

2:42Before Kickstarter, so many amazing projects had no chance to exist because they didn't fit some pre-existing 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.

3:21A 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.

3:56So 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.

4:34So 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.

5:08And 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?

5:44So 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 Artist Corporation, or A Corp.

6:11Now, 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 could 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.

6:45As they start to get paid, that money can automatically flow to each of the members according to pre-set 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.

7:18So 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.

7:30Now, 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.

8:11Now, 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 % 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.

8:47And it's going to bring more money into 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, to kings, to aristocracy, wealthy patrons, network executives, now corporate algorithms. But artist corporations finally give us our own seat at the table.

9:23To 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.

9:55One 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. 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

10:38and together we're going to build it thank you

10:48that was Yancey Strickler speaking at TED 2025 if you're curious about TED's curation find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. For more information, visit www.

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