Product Update 001 (July 2024)

This is our first quarterly update to the creative community sharing what’s going on behind the scenes with this project. These updates include what we’ve recently shipped, what we’re currently working on, and invitations to give feedback, get involved, and speak directly with us.

Below, we first start with some basic language about what Metalabel is and what our goals are. Then we explore where Metalabel is now and what we’ve recently shipped to support your creative work.

🚀 New Features

1. Browse releases by category. New releases are dropping each day. The homepage now lets you see browse releases by category, featured, and newest.
2. Estimated ship date for releases. When publishing a release, you can now mark an estimated ship date if you’re putting out physical work. This helps inform collectors when to expect the goods. We’ll send you nudge emails to help you stay on track.💡If you’re a creator with a release in flight, be sure to add your estimated ship date to the release to take advantage of this new feature.
3. Manage your earnings and splits. Get paid from your releases! The flow from setting an earnings split to people getting paid has been finalized and is out. Now creating a split among contributors and paying those people can all be handled with a few clicks compared to a nightmare of financial admin. YES!
4. Withdraw your earnings to your bank account. Funds paid out from your label’s releases can now be viewed on your creator account. With Stripe Connect, you can transfer it from Metalabel to your bank in your local currency any time.
5. Label deletion. Labels that don’t currently have launched releases can now be deleted permanently. This helps you clean up your trial runs.
6. Download and manage your Orders with filtered CSVs. [Coming very soon] We know order fulfillment is a doozy. The new Orders section lets you mark unfulfilled items fulfilled and allow you to download a filtered CSV list so you can manage delivery easier.

🧼 Improvements

1. Your releases are grouped into a label-centric dashboard. We’ve made changes to the side navigation to make it easier to find and organize your label and releases. There’s now a dedicated Dashboard for every label that easily lets you invite and manage members, drop new releases, and manage the money.
2. Improved clarity around user roles and access. We’ve simplified things so that there are four creator account types: Label Admin, Label Contributor, Release Admin, and Release contributor. For more information on who can see what, visit our Help Center.
3. Improved user interface for split setting. We noticed that some creators were confused about what a split is and what to do if you’re a solo creator. A better user experience, alongside a new detailed Earnings and Splits help page, clarifies how you can take advantage of shared earnings whether you come solo or in a group.
4. New countries supported. Creators in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay can now all launch releases on Metalabel. Welcome!

🐝 Bug Fixes

1. Little big details clean-up. Alignment, typography, terminology, button states — these are all the little big details that make a product feel polished. We hope you didn’t notice any major issues before, though there were a few. We believe these have been largely cleaned up. (But if you see something, tell us: hello@metalabel.com.)

🗺️ Up Ahead

All of the items listed above are things we’ve already shipped. We also wanted to talk about some of what’s coming up to support your experience on Metalabel.

1. Creator ← → Collector communication. This fall we’ll be working on various features that will enable direct community building between creators and collectors. We see collectors on Metalabel as your collectors. This big update will make sure collectors feel that way too.
2. Label builder/profile V2. Your label is what you stand for — how your releases roll up into a grand narrative. We’re scheming a new canvas for your label to express itself. Stay tuned.

💌 We want to hear from you

Metalabel is created by and for the collective creative community.

Is there a feature you dream of? Is there something that frustrates you? Or wish we do differently? Are you inspired by what we’re about to make and have thoughts about it? **Write us!** We’ve love to hear from you.

If you’ve applied to release with us and are still waiting, we appreciate your patience and you will hear more from us soon. Much of our methodical rollout has been creating time and space to make these important product improvements. We’re rapidly getting to a point where the platform will be ready to support more people. Keep following. More will emerge soon.

Who we are

Finally, we wanted to close with a short note about who the team at Metalabel is. We’re a tight-knit squad of eight people spread around the world.

All of the product, design, and engineering work we’re sharing here is thanks to our Build squad: Brandon (Engineering), Clayton (Engineering), Erin (Design), Ilya (Design), and Thaniya (Product). Joining them are Gina (Operations), Lauren (Creative Tech), and Yancey (Director). We love that we get to work together to serve you and this crazy ambitious vision.