Gigbloggy

Here on the doggy blog, we often reviewed fan-funding websites like Sellaband and Slice The Pie, and their merits in terms of validating fans and getting them emotionally and financially involved in a band’s business. But both these websites depend on a model that distributes royalties to the fan-investors, that gives them “ownership” of the product, reflecting the business-to-business aspect of how the music industry functions.

Then we reviewed another type of fan-funding platform called ArtistShare, where artists choose how they compensate fans for their contributions, often giving away exclusive products, content and opportunities such as getting a free house concert, assisting to studio recording, getting credited etc. This model, though which bands diversify their product line, has been extremely popular of late, probably because it is interesting and exciting to broaden the monetization scope of what you do, but also because it breaks down the “business feel” of the band-fan venture. As an example of how this can work, read this post we wrote on a bands who was funding its album through donation: How one band is funding its tours and albums
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Now I have just discovered a new like-wise service called KickStarter, where people video-pitch their projects and ideas to the world in hopes of gathering funds, much like TechCrunch’s Pitches website KickStarter is not only for musicians though – most projects aren’t about music at all, but some are. Check out April Smith’s pitch to produce her forth-coming album (you must click on the widget to see here nicely produced video):

April offers up to 14 different prizes in exchange for money, ranging from getting a free download ($5) to getting executive-producer credits plus a day in the studio ($10k). In between we have house concerts, a personal song, being featured in a music-video, singing with April on stage and so on. She is asking for $10k in total for the venture and has already managed to receive $8k from fans.

ArtistShare is very similar to KickStarter in its approach, and both websites represent what could become a revenue-model standard for the music scene. I am curious to see how they will play out in the years to come.

Mruff

(Discovered KickStarter through the Indie Music Tech blog – Band Metric’s official blog – check it out at http://indiemusictech.com)