Since 2006, artists raising funds on SellaBand had to reach the $50,000 mark to cash out (see previous post).  In a recent post on their blog, SellaBand announced that the company has reconsidered the model and will implement a flexible funding goal structure (from $10,000 to $100,000) which should make the platform accessible to more artists.

“When SellaBand was launched in 2006, we set out to make a difference.  A lot has happened, a lot has been achieved.  Over the years, the world SellaBand is operating in has changed, our environment has changed and our ideas of what the role of SellaBand as a company is has changed.  Almost on a daily basis we are being approached by bands, managements and labels, asking if they can somehow use the SellaBand concept and change it to their own liking.”

SellaBand is the first online platform to introduce the concept of fan funded music.  Anyone can invest in a SellaBand artist.  Once the artist has reached his or her funding goal, all Investors receive a free limited edition copy of the CD.  Artists and their Investors share equally in the revenues of album sales.

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Kickstarter

I’m very impressed with April Smith.

She’s a sassy self-starter and strong marketer.  And her music and image is top notch.

She won me over with this 2 minute video:

(Click here to watch it on Kickstarter.com)

At the time of this posting, April Smith raised $10,575 from pledges on Kickstarter to finance her next record.

When Sellaband launched in August 2006, it introduced music fans and unsigned artists to a revolutionary approach to meeting and collaborating with one another.  By providing a financial incentive at the very core of its proposition, the German upstart pioneered an investment platform that provided fans with a stake in their favourite artists’ assets, and artists with a means of raising capital for recording and distribution from the folks who care about them the most: their fans.  A seemingly far-fetched idea, the platform took off and, today, boasts an extensive fan funded artist base that has managed to raise over $2,200,000 collectively.  Although a handful of fan funded music dotcoms exist, including SliceThePie and TheNextBigSound, Sellaband is leading the trend that has yet to illustrate its full potential as an industry shifting force.  The company is now setting its sights on the US market with a high-profile endorsement from Chuck D.

P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.

POPcuts, a Y Combinator company, is an indie MP3 boutique with an interesting twist.  Similar in nature to Amie Street, the online store provides music fans with an incentive to discover and purchase new music.  Each time a track you purchased sells, you get a cut of the proceeds.  Previous buyers get a larger cut, so it pays to be a “trendspotter”.  The element of A&R role-play is one that I am discovering more and more of in various forms across the web.  See yesterday’s post on Slicethepie & Bebo.

Slicethepie and Bebo announced a co-venture this week whereby Bebo members will have the opportunity to grab the A&R seat at Slicethepie’s artist career-funding network.  Strikingly similar in concept to Sellaband, Slicethepie is tapping into the leading British social network’s community assets while Sellaband remains very much an independent platform.  The music “business” role-play idea has been embraced by a number of players in one form or another, including Songness, TheNextBigSound, and  Soundout, a Slicethepie imprint, based on the belief that if potential fans are provided with both a true hand in an artist’s fledgling career as well as a financial incentive, consumer loyalty and word-of-mouth shall follow.  Perhaps the shape of things to come.