Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation | Yancey Strickler

Summary

Podcast Summary: TED Talks Daily – "Forget Hustle Culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" by Yancey Strickler

Release Date: June 16, 2025

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Introduction

In the June 16, 2025 episode of TED Talks Daily, host Elise Hu introduces a compelling discussion on the evolving landscape for creative professionals. Highlighting the erosion of artists' power due to streaming platforms, corporate gatekeepers, and artificial intelligence (AI), the episode features Yancey Strickler, a writer, entrepreneur, and former CEO of Kickstarter. Strickler explores the potential of a transformative legal framework he terms the "Artist Corporation," designed to empower creators economically and organizationally.

Current Challenges for Creatives

Strickler opens by addressing the precarious financial situation faced by creative individuals today. He draws parallels with the music industry's transformation:

• Streaming Economy: “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” ([05:00]).

• Ghost Artists Phenomenon: Strickler cites recent research revealing the rise of "ghost songs" on platforms like Spotify—tracks produced by unnamed artists or AI that mimic popular sounds without providing royalties to original creators. “Real songs have to be paid real royalties. Ghost songs don't” ([06:15]).

• Economic Disparity: He highlights stark statistics, noting that “85% of visual artists make less than $25,000 a year and that just 13% of creative people earn a full-time living from their work” ([07:20]). This underscores a systemic issue where creative labor is undervalued and undercompensated.

• Lack of Support Systems: Unlike other professions, creative individuals often lack essential benefits such as healthcare, retirement plans, or pathways to collective wealth, leaving them “entirely on their own” ([08:10]).

The Concept of Artist Corporation

Strickler introduces the Artist Corporation (A Corp) as a radical solution to these challenges:

• Definition and Purpose: “You could think of an A corp as like a company, but built for how creative people work” ([09:30]). The Artist Corporation is envisioned as a collective entity that owns intellectual property, business assets, and equipment on behalf of its members.

• Revenue Allocation: Profits generated by the Artist Corp can be distributed according to pre-set agreements, ensuring transparent and equitable compensation. Additionally, funds can be directed into a shared treasury for future projects ([10:05]).

• Funding Opportunities: Artist Corporations would have access to both commercial revenue streams and non-profit funding sources. Importantly, they could issue shares, allowing for investments that appreciate the collective's value without selling individual rights to their creations ([11:00]).

Implementation and Examples

Drawing from his personal experiences with Kickstarter and the Metalabel project, Strickler illustrates the practical application of the Artist Corporation:

• Metalabel Initiative: “I started a new project to help creative people release work together. It's called Metalabel” ([07:50]). By collaborating on publications and sharing profits, Strickler and his peers demonstrated the viability of collective creative ventures.

• Dark Forest Collective Success: The collective’s first book sold 2,000 copies, generating over $70,000, and their second release promised even greater success. This organic growth highlighted the potential of structured collaboration ([09:00]).

• Legal Structuring Challenges: Strickler recounts the difficulty in fitting their collaborative model into existing legal frameworks like LLCs or nonprofits, which either offer limited benefits or come with excessive overhead. This gap inspired the creation of the Artist Corporation ([09:45]).

Benefits and Implications

The Artist Corporation promises to revolutionize the creative industries by:

• Empowering All Creators: Unlike traditional models that favor top-tier artists, the Artist Corp democratizes access to entrepreneurial tools, enabling every artist to benefit from collective ownership and shared resources ([10:30]).

• Economic Inclusion: “This is not a government handout. This is not a charity. This is the exact opposite” ([11:30]). The Artist Corporation integrates creatives fully into the capitalist framework, granting them the same economic agency as other industries.

• Fostering Innovation: By providing a stable and supportive structure, creatives can take risks and innovate without the fear of financial instability, potentially leading to unprecedented artistic achievements ([12:10]).

• Future Prospects: Strickler envisions a future where new enterprises like Disney are launched as Artist Corporations, driven by collective creative vision rather than corporate interests or AI algorithms ([12:40]).

Conclusion

Yancey Strickler concludes with a powerful call to action: “Artists don’t need pity. Artists need power. And together we’re going to build it” ([12:50]). The Artist Corporation stands as a beacon of hope for creatives worldwide, offering a sustainable and empowering pathway to prosperity and creative fulfillment.

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Notable Quotes

• Yancey Strickler: “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” ([09:15]).

• Strickler on Artist Corp Potential: “Artist corporations will treat them as real economic actors for the first time” ([11:10]).

• Inspirational Closing: “The next Disney won’t be started by AI or some traditional company. It’ll start as an artist corporation” ([12:40]).

Final Thoughts

Strickler's Artist Corporation concept presents a transformative approach to supporting and empowering artists in an increasingly digital and corporatized world. By fostering collective ownership, equitable profit distribution, and accessible entrepreneurial tools, the Artist Corp could herald a new era of creative prosperity and innovation.

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Produced by:
Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, Tonsika Sarmarnivon
Mixed by: Christopher Faizy Bogan
Additional Support: Emma Tobner, Daniela Ballorezzo

For more insights and fresh ideas, tune in to the next episode of TED Talks Daily.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

You'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 Yancy 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. Coming up.

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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. 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. These are unnamed uncredited musicians who are paid to make music that sounds like what the Spotify algorithm says says people want to hear. In recent years, some of Spotify's most prominent playlists have seen reel 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 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% of visual artists make less than $25,000 a year and that just 13% 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% of the profits would be split equally among us, and and 30% 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 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 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. They're 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% 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, to kings, the aristocracy, wealthy patrons, network executives, now corporate algorithms. But artists, 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 forums. 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. 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.

[Elise Hu]

That was Yancey strickler speaking at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curation guidelines 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 Greene, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar and Tonsika Sarmarnivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballorezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

[Yancy Strickler]

Thanks for listening.

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