Microfinancing, perhaps the hottest economic trend, has made its way to music over the last few years. You’ve probably heard of Sellaband. The service asks you to chip in for an artist on varying degrees to help them get enough money to record an album. Your reward for doing so is a copy of the album and the feel good you get from the experience.
I’ve also worked for Calabash Music’s Tune Your World campaign, now The Hector Fund, a microfinancing project designed to help artists from around the world create music.
The folks over at the music snob brought this topic up a few weeks ago, and seem to really covet it as a truly new model for the industry, a way to cut the middlemen and have fans interact directly with the artist.
I feel more and more negative writing on this blog, but from my experience, I just don’t think microfinancing works. It might be a question of the model’s nuances… Sellaband spends part of the $50,000 dollars that you raised to get an A&R person. What! You get 500 or more fans, “believers,” who love your music, then you need a suit to tell you what you should record in hopes of making you a pop star? I don’t know about that.
Ultimately though, Sellaband rests on pretty much the same assumption that any other new music monetizing agent does: that people are willing to buy music when they get it for free. Yikes, this is not business. This is charity! And don’t get me wrong, the idea of consumers supporting a band monetarily, especially bands who absolutely couldn’t afford to make a decent recording, is terrific. But treating it as method of business, as a model for all genres and applications, seems really treacherous.
My friends and I often joke that when everyone who is over 30 right now dies, music as an industry will either only release music on CDs that are completely unrippable, or cease to exist. I honestly want neither to happen. But microfinancing as a business model (not as an artistic or philanthropic one) seems to throw oil on guilt trip fire of buying music.
May 26th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Hey Ben, interesting post on Sellaband. Charity seems to be a long-standing tradition in the arts, going way back to patrons, etc. Not that I advocate relying upon it, since that is a terrible feeling and leaves one feeling helpless and pathetic. I’m interested in what you are doing with Amazing Wow. A modern music label, where the music is free. How are you generating revenue, then? What ideas are you seeing that, in contrast to the charity model, might actually work?
May 26th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
That sounds rewarding. Good ideas seem to be sprouting up more and more in spite of economic upheaval…
May 26th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Yo Brian,
I’m definitely not disputing the role charity has in art, and I think the “microfinancing” phenomenon is a totally cool example of it. Except that “microfinancing” obviously implies an investment — an investment with returns.
On this site, we use ads to generate revenue, and book tours for our bands. Our model is not perfect nor even fully implemented, but it doesn’t rely on donations or anything of the sort. I think it really just does boil down to what you’re trying to do… be a pop star, an art for art’s sake artist, or maybe even both. I think different models might work for different intentions.
May 6th, 2010 at 12:27 am
The service will ask for an artist chips in varying degrees, to help save enough money for the album. Your prize is a copy of this disc and it feels good to your experience.
May 6th, 2010 at 4:27 am
The service will ask for an artist chips in varying degrees, to help save enough money for the album. Your prize is a copy of this disc and it feels good to your experience.
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