Three kinds exist. Only one of them is yours to manage.
| Kind | Created by | Named | Rename | Delete |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom | You | By you | Yes | Yes |
| Screen | Automatically, per screen | After the screen | Rename the screen | With the screen |
| System | Built in | Fixed | No | No |
Custom
What “label” ordinarily means. You create them, apply them to screens and playlists, rename and delete them.
They appear on the Custom tab of the label dialog, which is the tab it opens on.
Screen
Every screen gets one when it is paired, and it takes its name from the screen. Rename the screen and the label’s name changes with it, which is why renaming a screen never breaks an assignment.
They live on the Screen tab, and they are hidden from a screen’s own list of labels, because a screen carrying a label named after itself would be noise on every row.
You do not create or delete these. Deleting the screen removes its label.
System
Built-in labels. Today that is All Screens, carried by every screen in the workspace including ones connected later.
They are on the System tab and cannot be renamed or deleted.
Why the three exist
So that “this one screen”, “this group”, and “every screen” are all expressible the same way.
A playlist has one mechanism for reaching screens: labels. If per-screen targeting were a separate feature, everything downstream, the API, the MCP tools, the screens tab on a playlist, would need to handle two cases. It handles one.