When Artists Become Startups

Photo by Julia Zyablova on Unsplash

I've been following the New Creative Era podcast since Yancey and Josh started broadcasting it. I can't say I agree with them on everything, but they definitely have an honest take on being an artist in the US during late-stage capitalism. They talk a lot about how artists should get paid better, and with that I totally agree.

Yancey's project is the A-corp: a legal framework in which artists can register as A-corp and then they can sell shares in their A-corp to investors, like a tech startup would. The idea is that artists become founders and keep control over the work. The investors get to fund them and share in the profits when the work increases in value.

This idea is exciting and definitely has advantages. For instance, creating a large body of A-corps would position artists better when negotiating for healthcare. It gives artists more power over their funding. Today’s model works against artists. You sell your work at a low price when you’re unknown and broke. When your career takes off, after years of hard work, your "investors" (who bought pieces at a low price) make most of the profit.

The A-corp system works entirely within the rules of capitalism, which worries me. I've been around startup founders for most of my adult life. I worry about Yancey presenting this as if you take on investors' money and nothing changes. A clause in the bill ensures artists retain 51% control. But even founders who retain control take on responsibility when they raise money. A system can always be gamed, and investors don’t need voting rights to exert pressure. How much freedom you're allowed before your investors write you off depends on your relationship with them. The more successful you already are, the more power you have to negotiate the terms, so you can have more control. New artists are most likely to feel obligated to work on a project that no longer calls to them, just because their investors loved it. No legal clause can neutralise this psychological shift.

But it’s not just about what happens to an individual artist when other people take a financial risk on them. It’s also about what the risk-taking system is willing to do. Big money is usually risk-averse. If you come from outside the system—if you're a woman or an immigrant or belong to any other minoritised group—you are always at a disadvantage. Investors view you as a bigger risk. For example, 42% of all US businesses are women-owned, but startups founded entirely by women received 1.1% of VC dollars in 2025. I can see A-Corp making things better for artists who are already privileged, without solving the funding gap for others. In short, it would replicate the existing power structure.

The A-Corp system has a lot of potential to finally make being an artist an actual job, with monetary value in our society. In the long run, it would probably increase the acceptance of art as a legitimate occupation. Instead of running alongside capitalism’s rules, art would come to live within them and use its tools to its advantage. But A-Corp, unlike a lot of art, doesn’t challenge the system of capitalism. I’ve long struggled with the relationship between money and art, so take this with a pinch of salt. But I think that if we as a society move art into a corporate framework, we lose something culturally. We lose art's power to stand outside the system and critique it. We can’t do that when we are the system.

VC money brings with it VC rules. From my experience, VCs always want to scale. It makes more financial sense. But not all art should scale. And not all artists would flourish at scale. I’m privileged. I don’t have to sell a lot of copies to pay my bills. But I don’t think I would have written better stories if I had the ambition to become a bestseller. When you try to get an artist to sell at scale when that isn’t what they want to do, you get things like David Geffen suing Neil Young for recording music that isn’t what Neil Young fans expected. VC logic will push artists to scale, creating unnecessary tension.

The A-Corp gives artists real tools and real power within a system that marginalises them, and its legal protections are genuine. The current status quo is broken. Artists should not have to be broke, uninsured and exploited. But the A-Corp risks entrenching a system where artistic worth is measured by investability. The artists most likely to doubt their artistic worth—young, minoritised, unestablished—are those with the least power to refuse this structure or negotiate better terms. They are also the ones most likely to be deemed too risky by investors or pressured to change their artistic choices to fit investors’ bottom line. How much art do we stand to lose?