You selling out to Facebook is a disgrace. It damages not only your reputation, but the whole of crowdfunding. I cannot put into words how betrayed I feel by this. — Oculus crowd funder backer Sergey Chubukov
What are the determining factors? The crowd sourcing site, the project, number of fans and followers?
Crowd sourcing sites handle the mechanics of raising the money, but what do they do to raise awareness?
Amanda Palmer, Dark Mountain, Steph Bradley have had very mixed results on using crowd sourcing.
Amanda Palmer is net savvy, has large number of fans and followers. Crowd sourcing for a new album was massively oversubscribed.
Imogen Heap, net savvy, a large number of fans, is using crowd sourcing to raise £200,000 for her Mi.Mu Glove for Music. With a little over £64,000 raised and 21 days to go, she has some way to go to meet her target of £200,000 for the project to go ahead.
Imogen Heap has used crowd funding to fund her latest album Sparks. A limited edition deluxe box set, the first one hundred were invited to a party at her house to collect, went within hours.
The Dark Mountain Project were able to successfully use crowd sourcing to fund Dark Mountain, their annual anthology of poetry, prose, essays and art, but less successful at funding their album From the Mourning of the World.
Steph Bradley only managed to raise a third of the money, nearly half if we add in those who financed her direct, for her book Flip Flop.
Farnham Local Food, has launched Grow-a-Grower crowd funding project. So far so good. But why launch through a crowd funding site, in this case, Crowdfunder? Even were the site to raise awareness, what interest is there going to be in a food growing project in Farnham? Zilch. The place to raise awareness is within Farnham and the surrounding area. What use is being made of garden share schemes?
How does crowd sourcing compare with alternative sources of financing, bank loans, knocking on the door of venture capitalists, an advance from record company or publisher?
A record label or publisher may grant an advance, which then has to be paid for out of royalties, but if sales do not meet expectation, the writer or artist is left penniless or worse, in debt to the publisher or record label, and then becomes little more than indentured labour.
On bandcamp take in pre-orders, on leanpub can serialise a book, with readers getting regular updates until they receive the final book.
Flip Flop will be serialised on leanpub as an e-book, when the funds raised, published as a paperback.
If people help crowd source a project, they are participating in the Gift Economy, they may get something in return, an album, signed copy of a book, tickets to a concert.
The cover art for Triptych I (Eight for a Wish) is a painting created by San Francisco artist Eden Gallanter, inspired by the song Supernova, which she heard the first time Artemis performed it live, at DNA Lounge in December 2012. It is well worth exploring more of Eden’s deeply intuitive art and science through her new Cheimonette Tarot deck at kickstarter. The deck includes a compilation CD of music inspired by the cards and Eden’s readings — songs from Meredith Yayanos, Jill Tracy, Unwoman, Mark Growden, Star St. Germain, Myrrh Larsen and Artemis.
The Triptych trilogy was released as a series of limited edition albums. Triptych trilogy with three art prints is limited to five.
Those seeking the funding should be prepared to contribute to the Global Commons, else why should anyone fund them?
Imogen Heap has agreed to make her music glove project open source.
Oculus was funded through kickstarter. It was then sold to facebook for $2 billion. Venture capitalists who muscled in made a killing those who supported the project in its early stages got nothing.
Around 10,000 people gave Oculus $2.5m between them. Should each of them not have got a proportional share of that $2 billion sale? Should it have even been sold to facebook?
Many more scandals like Oculus, and crowd funding will acquire a dirty name and the funds will simply dry up.
This is the type of dirty behaviour we expect from the banks, the antithesis of a contribution to the Global Commons.
Lush will often match funding for a social or environmental project. Costa Coffee on the other hand gets its customers to donate to Costa Foundation to help poor coffee growers and gets all the credit.
While you were sleeping, Amanda Palmer built an army. – Sean Francis
They thought I looked fat. I thought they were on crack. — Amanda Palmer
I feel sorry for them. they are trying to sell pieces of plastic in a digital world. but they’re barking up the wrong tree if they think they can katy perry or avril lavigne me into the walmarts of the world. — Amanda Palmer
I feel an extraordinary amount of sympathy for anybody working at a major label right now because their lives are over. — Amanda Palmer
Nowadays the game has changed so much that I would never advise a band like us to sign up with a company like that. — Amanda Palmer
You can download this album for a dollar. You can of course choose to pay more.
Amanda Palmer used to be on a major record label. It was not a happy experience, and when she tried to leave, it was not easy.
The lyrics of Please Drop Me give some idea of how unhappy the relationship:
Please drop me, what do I have to do?/ I’m tired of sucking corporate dick.
Her record company objected to exposure of her stomach on a video, called her fat, and wanted it cut. Amanda Palmer practices yoga and can by no means be described as fat. She told her fans. They responded with a ReBellyon, published a book The Belly Book. By now Amanda Palmer had had enough of her record label, wrote on her blog what a bunch of shits they were, put it into her song lyrics. She wanted out, even going as far as composing and performing a song called “Please Drop Me,” which asked the label to free her from the contract.
Had the Warner Bros label not dropped her she threatened to have ‘3,000 devoted Amanda fucking Palmer fans showing up at their corporate offices in New York dressed like zombies. ‘
Now she is free and happy. She is in control of her career, not a faceless corporation. She now has a sustainable musical career.
Amanda Palmer follows the advice of Steve Lawson (who follows his own advice) and like Imogen Heap and Paulo Coelho knows how to make effective use of social media, social networking. And note it is social media, many to many, interaction; not broadcast, one to many. And that interaction has to be genuine, not going through the motions.
Paulo Coelho has been happy to give his books away, to see them on pirate web sites. His latest is to offer his back catalogue for digital download at 99 cents an e-book. An offer at the moment restricted to US and Canada.
Hope and Social see the advantages of giving music away free. And by doing so they are making more money, and having more fun, than when they followed the conventional model of being on a corporate record label.
The Sixteen have stuck their collective toe into crowd sourcing and community supported music, but sadly seem to have lost the plot on the way, too corporate, money buys access and privileges. A pity as their concerts are well attended and they have a good support base. But, they have to get involved, mix with people at their concerts, move the stall selling their music away from a cold entrance, where three people and the entrance is blocked, to a more prominent location, man the stall, not leave it to staff. For their next recording, they need to take their followers with them, talk through what is happening, the composers, the recording, the artwork, video blogs, question and answer sessions. It can no longer be, we are the performers, you are the audience.
Below thoughts of Amanda Palmer originally posted on Techdirt.
And below that thoughts of Sean Francis, who has helped Amanda for years on the tech/social side of things.
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There’s a great story about how bamboo grows. A farmer plants a bamboo shoot underground, and waters and tends it for about three years. Nothing grows that’s visible, but the farmer trots out there, tending to this invisible thing with a certain amount of faith that things are going to work out. When the bamboo finally appears above ground, it can shoot up to thirty feet in a month. This is like my kickstarter campaign. The numbers aren’t shocking to me, not at all. I set the goal for the kickstarter at $100,000 hoping we’d make it quickly, and hoping we’d surpass it by a long-shot.
I’ve been tending this bamboo forest of fans for years and years, ever since leaving roadrunner records in 2009. Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that i curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on…all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY. Asking my poor fans to give a dollar, or if nothing else, to spread the link; asking my rich fans to loan me money at whatever level they can afford to miss it for a while.
And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.
I’ve seen people complaining that this is easy for me to do because I got my start on a major label. It’s totally true that the label helped me and my band get known. But after that, the future was up to me. It bought me nothing but a headstart, and I used it. I could have stopped working hard and connecting in 2009. If I’d done that, and then popped up out of nowhere in 2012 to kickstart a solo record in 2012, my album would probably get funded to the tune of $10k…if I was lucky. There are huge ex-major label artists (pointless to name names) who have tried the crowd-funding method and failed dramatically, mostly because they didn’t have the online relationship with their fans to rely on. And vice versa: plenty of young upstarts with a small but devoted fanbase have kicked ass using crowdfunding, because they’ve taken a hands-on approach online and at shows, and have been close and connected with their fans ALL THIS TIME, while nobody was caring or watching.
I tweet all day. I share my life. My REAL life. The ugly things, the hard things. I monitor my blog religiously. I read the comments. I ask for advice. I answer questions. I fix problems. I take fans at their word when they see me at a show and tell me their vinyl arrived broken in the mail. I don’t try to hide behind a veil of fame. I don’t want to be anything more than totally human. I make mistakes, get called out, and apologize. I share my process. I ask for help SHAMELESSLY. I sleep at my fans houses. I eat with them. I read the books they write. I see their plays and dance performances, online and in real life. I back their own crowdfunding projects. I get rides home with them. I’m the kind of person they WANT to help, because they know me well enough, after years of connecting, to know WHO I ACTUALLY AM. They don’t just get a photoshopped snapshot of my every time I have an album to promote. They see the three-dimensional person, in motion, in real-time. Living and working.
There is no marketing trick. There is human connection, and you can’t fake it. It takes time and effort and, most importantly: you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you’ll be miserable.
We’re entering the era of the social artist. It’s getting increasingly harder to hide in a garret and lower your songs down in a bucket to the crowd waiting below, wrapped in a cloak of sexy mystery above. That was the 90s. Where an artist could be as anti-social as they wanted, and rack up cred left and right for shoe-gazing and detaching. It’s over. The ivory tower of the mysterious artist has crumbled. If you’re painfully shy and antisocial and hate tweeting and blogging and connecting and touring…and you really just want to write and sing music and be left alone, you can still succeed…if your music is BRILLIANT. But you better have a damn clever boyfriend, girlfriend or friend-manager to fight your battle for you and lift the megaphone in your name, because no longer will a huge, magical company scoop you up and do all the heavy lifting (or if they do, they’ll charge you 100% of your income for the service).
I got asked today on Twitter: “why is an artist your size using kickstarter? shouldn’t you leave crowdfunding to the peple who need it?”
I answered: all artists at every level (even the Gagas and Madonnas) have to somehow raise capital for their work, whatEVER level it’s at. some artists go to labels/companies for the capital to fund albums & tours. Now artists (at any level) can go direct to their fans. The end.
The basic tenets of success in music are still true: have good songs, touch people, work hard. But as far as getting around from place to place… musicians are no longer traveling by limo with one-way glass protecting them from view. Now we’re all going on foot, door to door, in the open sunshine… with the internet as our magical, time-space defeating sidewalk.
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The internet’s been synonymous to Wild West’ian outlaws and lawlessness for so long, I think people forget that it’s also got another REALLY appealing attribute: it’s a giant safety net. And if you spend time nurturing and engaging the people holding that net, you KNOW you’re going to get caught.
For several years, I’ve watched and aided, as Amanda’s interwoven strategies predicated on those two things – pioneering and connection.
As new media has emerged, we’ve looked at how it’d be advantageous to her career, and in what ways it could be potentially beneficial to the fanbase… and as she’s toured, written, recorded, and Twitter’d away, we were privately (and sometimes publicly) playing with puzzle pieces which are culminating in the release of this new album.
To get this right, Team AFP have spent hours on the phone and sent literally hundreds of emails, every week (sometimes daily)…and with the launch of our Kickstarter this past Monday, the public is seeing what several years of work can do.
When Amanda fell or misstepped in the process of trying to get this right, her net was there. And now that she’s ready to do this on her terms, they still are.
Maybe it’s a small collection of fans in some people’s eyes – but it’s a SOLID one – that believe in art and connection. And I’m watching it grow in size by the minute… not just monetarily, either.
While you were sleeping, Amanda Palmer built an army.
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