Artist Share: when fan funding is not all about sharing royalties

Here is a little note on yet another fan funding website called Artist Share. Its model differs from those of SellABand or SliceThePie where any band can sign-up and start the funding process right away.

Artist Share is selective: either you’re accepted or you’re not, and the site apparently aims at pretty specific styles of instrumental music like classical and jazz. Another important difference is that fans don’t necessarily obtain shares of the produced album, and therefore don’t perceive royalties from its sales.

Although Artist Share clearly isn’t for everyone, it still offers a nice take on the fan-funding model. In exchange for financial support, the fans are offered access to a more personal and probably more rewarding side of the production – the creative process.

We had already talked about the band Shane Hines and the Trance who had devised a donation plan to get their album funded by offering donors personal attention like guitar lessons, free cooked dinners, house concerts etc (read the story here). Artist Share works a little along those lines. In exchange for donations, fans receive different offers depending on the amount of their donation. Prices start at a couple of bucks and can go up to thousands of dollars with offers ranging from limited edition CD/DVD packages to an invitation to a recording session. The artists really chooses what he wants to throw in the deals.

Lots of offers are about helping the fan get to know his band a little better by making the experience personal. By doing so not only does the artist feel validated but so does his donor-audiences. I think this brings great value to the creative process as the main actors, the bands and their fans, work together for the completion of the project.

What better way to consolidate healthy long-lasting relationships with your fans then by helping them help you. In most cases that’s what they all strive for.

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YouLicense provides new licensing opportunities by partnering with TheCellFreak and SellaBand

Here’s an update on Youlicense (the music licensing marketplace) – the startup has been fairly active in the past months, sealing deals here and there to consolidate its position in the online-licensing market.

• TheCellFreak, a free mobile content site, wants to license up to 1000 songs from YouLicense users. Although they’re only willing to pay about 25$ per each song license (which isn’t all that much money), it’s still a step in the right direction, as your tunes will most likely be downloaded as ringtones, making for great exposure. In addition, the deal is non-exclusive, meaning you still have full control over your songs. All in all it seems like a pretty quick and painless way to get your music distributed through an exciting new channel.

• YouLicense has also developed partnerships with a couple of independent labels, the last one to date being SellaBand. The online fan-funding site is seeking licensing deals for 11 of it’s 24 artist roster. The earning will be split in 3: 30% to the composer, 30% to YouLicense and 30% to the Believers (Believers is a term SellaBand uses to call those funding the albums). Wired’s Listening Post has more.

• Also, YouLicense just received an extra $1 million in funding to further develop it’s global advertising strategy and content acquisitions. Yea I know, who cares:) But this also means that early-adopters of this platform might have a chance of being the first to be discovered as it becomes more established.

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How one band is funding its tours and albums

Shane Hines and the Trance are a band trying to get their album produced through donations. We had already seen how certain websites help fans fund albums by giving them a share in royalties, but this band takes a different approach.

On the TeamTrance website, you’ll find the list of prizes that you can get in exchange for your donation:

$15 – our brand new EP (to be recorded with your help!)
$30 – our brand new EP and a demo of 3 unreleased songs
$50 – our brand new EP and an acoustic demo of 3 unreleased songs
all levels listed below include our brand new EP, a tshirt with all TeamTrance names on it and an acoustic demo of 3 unreleased songs
$100 – Simply so we don’t have to iron tshirts in the middle of the night. ☺
$175 – 4 tickets to shows where Shane Hines and the Trance is headlining
$250 – 2 one hour guitar lessons with Shane and Thumbs
$500 – Shane and Thumbs cook dinner at your house
$750 – Go on a road trip to a show with the band
$1,000 – You are feeling very generous and we are feeling very thankful
$1,500 – An acoustic living room concert, invite your friends for these and make it a party!
$2,500 – full band house concert, invite more friends, have more fun
$5,000 – Want to make music? Go into studio with the band and record a song, What a great gift!
$10,000 – A very cool Gibson guitar, rehearsal with Shane Hines and the Trance and live performance with the band

They have apparently accumulated more then $23,000 so far, and their manager informed us that this was done in a little over 2 weeks (!) . Whether it was two very generous parents/grandparents who dropped $10K each, or legions of fans that donated money to help this band out, is not specified. The point is that the idea of offering original services in exchange for capital raising is something any band could try. Makes up for good creative financing.

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How bands can fund their next album: social record-labels

Social networks for bands are great for networking and getting your music heard, but passed that point it’s pretty hard to determine whether or not your music is really appealing to others. Your family is certainly not the place to start to feel validated. Your friends can deliver better insight, although their point of view is obviously biased. As for Myspace, it’s a lot easier to add thousands of friends than to acquire real fans.

There are some websites who put more emphasis on the interaction between bands and their fans. Those websites not only represent real validation for the artist, but also big-time opportunities. The other day we took a look at DeepRockDrive, a great site that allows fans to get their bands booked for an online show. Today we’ll look review two websites that allows fans to fund your albums.

Sellaband.com is a place where music fans can invest in upcoming bands. If a band finds 5000 people to spend 10 bucks on the making of their album, they get sent into a studio to record it. In other words the site helps bands raise $50 k from the community to produce a set of songs. The ‘believers’ as they call them, are then entitled to royalties on the album sales. A nice web 2.0 win/win solution that has attracted a lot of hype. The community is creating the content but it’s also choosing and funding it.

Not only has Sellaband recently raised a big chunk of money from its investors to further developp its model, but an analog UK website, barely founded a year ago, has now apeared to fill in the european market.

Slicethepie.com is a little more complex than sellaband in that it filters bands thanks to ‘scouts’. Before reaching the financing stage, bands must first be subject to preliminary reviews by music fans. Anyone can sign-up as a critic/a&r, head for the ‘scout rooms’ and get paid for their reviews. On the artist front, they enter ‘arenas’ where they are opposed to up to 1000 other bands. A maximum of 20 will make it through to a voting stage. The most popular bands receive £15,000 to finance their album. Fans can also directly invest in an artists giving them royalty benefits and other goodies. But here things get complicated so I really suggest reading how their whole financing plan works cause I will certainly not explain it better then they do (in summary the fan/investors get backstage passes and free CDs plus the possibility to buy stocks/contracts that they will be able to trade and sell in the Slicethepie market place). What’s important here is that fans become emotionally and financially involved in their band’s progress, and start to feel like A&R stock-exchange record-label broker journalists or something. I have been on their forums and read that people spend hours a days reviewing music and getting paid for it.They aren’t making a living but they have a blast.

Here both fans and bands get validated actually, portraying what the future myspaces might become: interactive websites where this simple calling-card profile type model is obsolete, moving onto more dynamic places where interaction and validation are as important as what the band wants to display.

Concerning band validation, I suggest a great post  form the Music Think Tank blog: create, validate, sell.

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