How Colorado's new 'A-Corp' law helps artists become business owners

Artists in Colorado will soon have the opportunity to own and fundamentally control their companies thanks to a recently passed state law.

The Artist Company Act creates Artist Corporations, or A-Corps, a designation that will function similar to other business structures like C-Corps or S-Corps. A-Corps are artist-owned and majority-controlled businesses that are guided by an artistic mission—which can even take priority over revenue growth. The law has a broad definition of what an artist is: “an individual who creates any work of authorship or artistic expression” in “any medium,” including “digital content.” And through A-Corps, artists can separate their ownership and control over the company from its economic structure and have a tighter grip on their intellectual property, too.

Yancey Strickler, one of the leading advocates for A-Corps, told Morning Brew that the structure is about giving artists more legal and corporate power. As the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter, he said he saw firsthand how new legal forms for companies (like public benefit corporations—Kickstarter was among the first to adopt the designation) allowed for new types of ownership and behaviors.

“Rather than a bunch of [artists] being rounding numbers in a larger system where everyone’s doing something bespoke, if we’re all using the same form, then that allows for things like shared benefits,” Strickler said. “[It] allows for us to be recognized by the state and be given tax incentives and things like that in the future. It allows for us to go to health insurance companies and say, ‘A-Corps should have a group plan.’”

Creating that “form” for artist-owned businesses took a lot of research. Strickler said he found that “roughly half” of the artists he spoke with don’t have any sort of legal structure to their enterprises and that Colorado would be a fitting incubator for the first A-Corps to take shape.

“Sundance [Film Festival] just moved to Colorado, and Colorado has a really big creative industry,” he said. “There’s going to be an initial cohort of folks we’re going to be working closely with, and we’ll find out together what parts of this are confusing, what needs to be iterated on, what makes sense.”

A-Corps will be similar to LLCs, and Strickler said he expects the inaugural class to exist early next year. Artist Corporations, the advocacy organization behind the idea, expects A-Corp laws to pop up in other states soon, including in California, New York, and Delaware. Strickler, though, is focused right now on Colorado.

“In three to five years, we’ll be able to point and say, ‘People are materially better, there’s more security, [a] higher percentage of people get healthcare,’” he said. “This is the start.”