Third Nature is an artist-controlled cooperative record label. Our mission is to make music more equitable for artists and to operate transparently and ethically. We aim to hard code transparent, mutualist values into the financial, legal, and curatorial structure of a record label.

Our intentions are not new or radical. Collective solidarity and aesthetic bias towards adventurous and vulnerable voices have always been implicit in DIY music communities. We hope to respectfully build on that tradition, working alongside our friends and allies who continue to do good work operating traditional indie labels.

Our methods, however, aim towards trying something new. By starting small, but thinking BIG.

Traditional indie labels operate with legal and financial habits inherited directly from for-profit megacorps, but retool them to operate at a smaller scale. This structural inertia encourages “necessary” evils like secrecy around artist contracts, lack of parity in decision-making, rent seeking behavior, and artists/fans participating only passively in the financial and legal aspects of the creation of music.

We propose that artists, their fans, and those who labour to help them would benefit by actively rethinking the legal and financial processes that produce and distribute the music they love with an eye towards win-win scenarios and mutual aid.

It is unproductive to merely call for “cutting out the middleman” and disregard the labour and intent of those who invest in our music communities. The mercenary independent musician, bulk-uploading audio content designed to please an algorithm for better playlisting, benefits no one but large online streaming services who sell music as auditory wallpaper. Taken to its extreme, this artist-as-mercenary model leads to a world in which there is one streaming record label called Spotify. But that boring future will only occur if music communities completely atrophy.

We propose that music communities are far from dying, however, they are in desperate need of a new organisational structure that more explicitly realises their implicit values. We propose that a healthy, functioning music community consists of fans, investors (of labour or money), and artists.

Crucially, it must be realised by the music communities that these roles need not be mutually exclusive, and must not be adversarial. We propose that the current financial and legal structure of independent record labels is not the most accurate reflection of the hearts of those who operate them, or the hearts of artists they represent, or the hearts of their fans.

Third Nature is and attempt to build and encourage a structure that reflects our community’s implicit values of kind, adventurous mutualism explicitly.