SONG CONTEST BLOG

When SellaBand launched in August 2006, it introduced music fans and unsigned artists to a revolutionary approach to creating music together.

Today, I discovered that the service (as we know it) is down for good.

Posted on the SellaBand website:

On Friday February 19th, SellaBand AG requested provisional suspension of payments (moratorium).  This was granted by the Court in Amsterdam on the same day.  Yesterday, Monday February 22nd, this moratorium was changed into bankruptcy, with appointment of, Mr Paul Schaink, an amsterdam lawyer, as trustee.  The trustee wishes to inform the ‘Sellaband community’ that, apart from a few technicalities, the completion of a transaction with a potential buyer of the business, is to be expected soon, in order to make a fresh start, safeguarding both the rights of Believers and Artists.  More news will follow shortly.

On behalf of the trustee,

Johan Vosmeijer
CEO SellaBand

25-year old female singer, Hind, completed her fund raising project on SellaBand, the foremost fan-funds-artist platform.  In just 11 days, Hind, a former Pop Idol from the Netherlands, raised €40,000 ($60,000) to record a new studio album.  Almost 1,000 Believers (fans) from over 50 countries invested an average of $5,500 per day, a new artist fund raising record!

Related Posts
SellaBand – Fan Funded Music 2.0
Kickstarter – where good ideas get funded
How to raise $10,000

Pubic Enemy is the first established act to sign with SellaBand, the fan funding platform for music artists.  SellaBand will facilitate the fan funding process for Public Enemy’s new album with the band aiming to raise $250,000 in increments of $25.00.  Fans who invest in Public Enemy will receive an exclusive, numbered copy of the album and share in the revenues from sales of the record.

“SellaBand’s financial engine model goes about restructuring the music business in reverse,” says Public Enemy front man Chuck D.  “It starts with fans first, then the artists create from there.  The music business is built on searching for fans and this is a brand new way for acts to create a new album with fans first, already on board.”

The news follows an earlier press release from SellaBand announcing an improved and more accessible fan funding platform for independent artists, which I wrote about here.

Related Posts
About SellaBand
About Kickstarter
About Pledge Music

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.

Related Posts
How to raise $10,000
Pledge Music
Kickstarter

Music discovery and playlist service, Grooveshark, was selected as one of ten winners in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 in the “Audio & Music” category, sharing the spotlight with the formidable usual suspects including iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Pandora.  This is indeed a privilege for the Floridian upstart which triumphed over CD Baby, iLike, Sellaband, Jango, and other well publicized and funded music dotcoms.  Nearly 630,000 votes were cast this year.

Related Posts
Grooveshark Artists
Spotify
Jango Airplay

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.

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.

Songness, launched last summer, provides a platform for songwriters and performing artists to receive feedback from prospective fans.  Much like the SoundOut concept, Songness is geared toward populating relevant marketing reports through “virtual focus groups” that will help its music-making users identify potential fans and improve their craft through constructive criticism.  Songness has taken a unique approach to artist-to-fan interaction by focusing on the relationship between the artist and fan as the music is being created, rewritten and improved, rather than engaging the fan with the finished musical product, a strategy which OurStage and Sellaband have deployed with lots of financing and reasonable traction (see The Next Big Sound also).  With Songness, the idea is to test your songs before you go to market.  There is also the promise of turning new fans into paying customers but here, I think, Songness may be getting carried away.  I haven’t signed-up yet but the site looks good and the concept relevant.

Recommended online artist development platforms:

ReverbNation provides marketing and artist development solutions for up and coming musicians that need to “compete, cooperate, and differentiate in an increasingly noisy online environment”.   With a 360-degree approach, ReverbNation offers every tool in the shed for fledgling artists plus social and professional networking solutions in a single hub.

Music Nation, an artist-fan-promoter community, provides an array of music marketing features, as well as song contest and songwriting opportunities.  Perhaps more fan-centric than ReverbNation, Music Nation has also adopted the 360-degree approach to artist development.

OurStage, an artist and fan community that revolves around a “democratic” songwriting contest, has been making a splash as a pull-marketing platform for songwriters and recording artists to receive objective feedback from potential fans.

SellaBand, a vision of the music industry to come, has harnessed the power of niches and created an artist development platform that allows fans to, literally, put their money where their mouth is.  With a low risk and easy to digest financial investment program for music lovers, artists enjoy recording and A&R opportunities if they manage to attract enough “believers”.

YouLicense, the first independent music licensing platform, is where artists and music buyers engage one another and cut out the middle man.  With a host of music licensing opportunities in every imaginable musical genre, YouLicense is an artist development favorite.

MyDrifts is more than just a MySpace music marketing system, it’s an entire suite of music marketing tools for the artist or artist manager that wishes to better target his marketing efforts and learn about his audience.

Sonicbids is an artist development veteran, helping bands get gigs, and promoters book the right bands.  Their community consists of bands, singers, songwriters, and performers of all kinds, and music buyers of all kinds, including singer songwriter competition promoters, music licensors, festival programmers, and more.

Next Big Sound, a site developed by four students at Northwestern University and described as a cross between MySpace and American Idol by The New York Times, has come to fruition last August as yet another platform for independent artists and fans to come together in a digital environment of discovery and competition.  Better described as another player in the realm of Sellaband and OurStage, The Next Big Sound looks great and promises adventure in role-play A&R for music fans and, with any luck, an opportunity for independent artists to raise their profile.

The site boasts 2000 “moguls” that have “signed” 9000 acts to date.  The business model surrounding the idea is not yet clear but, if it takes off, I imagine that there will be plenty of opportunities for the company, participating artists and, of course, moguls (music fans) to monetize a piece of the proverbial action.