Product Update 002 (October, 2024)

📰 The headlines

What's happening in the Metalabel universe right now?

Metalabel opens this week. Today we’re officially opening the doors and welcoming people to release with us. Metalabel will continue to be reserved 100% for creative work, so there will be a pre-screening process for new people, but we aim to welcome all artists and creative people to release work with us.

Metalabel is the first release platform for creative work. This is how we’re introducing ourselves. A new space for creative people and collectors to release and discover creative work. You can read more about the features that power it here.

A bunch of amazing people are releasing with us this fall. As part of today’s announcement, we’re introducing the Fall/Winter 2024 Collection, which includes new releases from Brian Eno, the David Graeber Institute, Other Internet, Mindy Seu, Marcel Dzama, and many more. See the list here.

Best of all: all artists can join them.

🚀 What’s New

What's new with the product?

Editions

New under the “What’s included?” tab of the Release Builder is a powerful feature called Editions that makes your release much more flexible. Editions let a release offer multiple levels of support. A few ways to use editions:

• One of ones. If you're an artist releasing multiple individual pieces in a series, editions allow you to offer each piece on its own within a wider collection.
• Multiple levels of bundled offers. Make different versions of editions of the same work available on the same release page. Up to five editions per release.
• New runs of sold out releases. Sometimes a limited edition release does better than expected and sells out quickly. Create a second edition of the release on the same page that lets you honor existing collectors while allowing your audience to continue to grow. This Post Individual release is an example.
• Sizes or other variations of a single item. Use editions to offer a garment in distinct sizes. See this mock up.
• International shipping. We don’t yet have variable shipping rates (working on it), but you can approximate them with editions. Make a domestic only edition limited to people in your country with a lower shipping rate using the Builder, then offer an international edition with a higher shipping rate.

Editions are available to all creator accounts and releases starting today.

The Metalabel Release Guide

The Metalabel Release Guide contains our accumulated wisdom on how best to use Metalabel and now it’s available on our website for anyone to consult. Check it out here.

Contact the Label

We’ve added a feature that lets your collectors contact you directly about orders. When starting a label a help email address for your label is now required where all inquiries will be sent. If you haven’t done so, we strongly encourage an update to your label settings asap.

Only people who have collected your work can contact you. We offer a form which requires an order number and email that matches your records in order to send an inquiry to your email address. The contact email you provide will not be visible or crawl-able from any websites.Collector cardsWe shipped an update to the digital cards collectors receive after purchasing a work to celebrate the work itself, the collector who supported it, and when they supported. The first ten collectors on a release have a special badge noting them as early supporters. More to come on this front.

Simpler splits entry

We heard from you that revenue splits are a new concept that people need some help understanding. So we’ve made the design of splits clearer and hopefully easier to use.

On the Earnings tab of the Builder, you can now choose whether a release should be split or paid out to an individual. If it’s a group, you can put anyone listed as a contributor to the release on the split at whatever percentage you set.

👋🏽 Saying hi

We wanted to close with a short note about the team at Metalabel. 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).

On occasion we drop our own original releases too (find them at **squad.metalabel.com)**. We love that we get to work together to serve you and this crazy ambitious vision.