I really like the “long tail” business plan of this new unsigned musicians site.
SellaBand
The idea is that if you are a songwriter or a band, you upload a few demo mp3s and then try to get lots of people to sponsor the recording of an album. ‘Believers’ can buy stakes of $10 each which entitle them to a small slice of the ad revenue from the eventual professionally recorded music, which is provided free for download. The Artists get a stake as well, of course, and the website retains a percentage for themselves. That’s clever.
I heard about it on BBC world service radio in the middle of the night, (I had been kept awake by the excrutiating symptoms of Tomato Flu) and the spokesman from the website sounded sufficiently clued in and modest with it. They don’t expect anybody to raise the full $50,000 anytime this year, but they’ve been really pleased with the amount of trust which fans of unsigned bands have shown already. What they are providing is a mechanism which can be used as a roadmap for writing, financing and producing an album, and one which builds a really good relationship with a loyal fanbase at the same time, which can then be used as a springboard to greater things.
My only reservations are that you have to sign over forever, a proportion of the royalties for the songs which are recorded, so you might not want to put all of your best songs on the first album and then be left with ‘second album syndrome’ for the real deal.
For research purposes, I created my own profile on the site here:
(It’s not often I get to beat all the other Andy Robertses to a user name)
So is there anybody out there who wants to ‘believe’ to the extent of $50,000?
No? Ok, it’ll have to be $10 each then.
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Contact me on aroberts@gmail.com or @aroberts on twitter
I think what has to be borne in mind is that like anything related to stardom, sellaband is selling a dream to people, where in reality almost nobody will truly benefit from it.
Note also that the sellaband owners have access to free cash to invest and earn interest from. You, as a “believer” are financing them to create a savings fund, or worse, and investment fund. what about the money the “believers” place in the band? Shouldn’t the band earn interest on the funds placed? after all, they have done all the hard work in selling the “believers” into putting up their cash.
bear also in mind that almost no band will hit the 50,000 target but they will all try, hoping that others will hop on this get easy money scheme concocted by sellaband. Thus money will build up in someone’s coffers earning someone interest. For free.
and in the end of the day, once you HAVE the money, what do they do with it? They SPEND IT!! ON THEMSELVES! yes, you get to take that money ad give it to these “professionals” to make a one-off product of unguaranteed quality or results. And do you even get to choose the professionals who work on producing your album? Of course not!!!
and will the bands stop hounding their friends to give them money? Will they lose friendships if the believers, after a year of seeing nothing descide they want their money back? You betcha.
calling the investors “believers” is another way of making it hard for people to take their money out of the scheme once it’s in. I can hear the cries now, in a year’s time, when your dodgy garage band hasn;’;t made it big, and only 250 dollars including the 100 you got from your grndmother, the 50 you took from yuor savings account, is all you heve. “So, you don’t believe in me, is that what you are saying?”
this is a fairly cynical scheme, and seems to be siply several streams of income into the pockets of devious music industry sharks. The long tail is log indeed, there are suckers born every minute and this amply takes advantage of several thousand more of them, using nothign more than selling a dream. It’s not an MLM, but offers about teh same chances of success to dreamers of making it big through it.
Dear Mike,
You know what they say about opinions, so I won’t deny your right to have one too. There’s a lot of things that I could write in reaction to your comments, but I will limit myself to the pure facts.
1. The money Believers put into their artists of choice is kept on a so called escrow-account. In case you don’t know what that means, there is a legally binding rule that we, as owners of the escrow account, cannot touch that money until a band has raised $50.000. In other words, we cannot turn this account into an investment fund, nor can we buy fancy cars from it or book nice trips to the Bahama’s. Yes, the interest will go to us, but that money will go straight back into the development of the website and the creation of an artist incentive program (useful tools for bands on their way to 50k).
2. Almost no band will ever raise 50k? Barely one month after our launch, one band is already over 10.000 in budget an counting. The big publicity wave on SellaBand is yet to come, but already 2,000 people have registered as Believers, and close to 3,500 Parts have been sold. Based on these figures we are very optimistic that in the (near) future, quite a few artists will be able to raise the money that is required to record with us.
3. Bands have free choice of producers and studio’s, as long as it fits into the budget. The only person that is ‘mandatory’ is the A&R person. He or she will be assigned by us and will then guide the artist through the recording budget. All of the money will be used for production, manufacturing and distribution, bands have the option to see the bills if they want to.
All the best,
Johan Vosmeijer
Managing Director SellaBand
Here’s my take on the subject:
http://www.theplugg.com/2006/11/01/sellaband-is-the-hype-real/
There is no doubt that Sellaband is a very compelling new music business model which makes everyone pound their head why I didn’t think about it first. Also Sellaband does really well convince artists and their believers this model is working as we can see fast growing numbers of artists.
However, I am still in doubt on reality issue here. Nemesea just made $50,000 recently but the second most part sold artist doesn’t look like he has an fast journey as Nemesea did.
No one can tell how long it takes for all artists to make 50k and if they can even make it or not. Sellaband is like dream to artists. I wonder whether it is worth putting the all efforts on sellaband to save everyday sales to the sweet drop last drop or get back to reality and sell even one MP3 everyday.
There are lots of digital music distributors for indie and unsigned artists. They enable indie artists to sell their music without publishing any CD or licking a single stamp. Artists, shouldn’t give up dreams but don’t have to starve yourselves for your dreams that you don’t know when they come.
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Here’s my 2 cents on this subject
1) If you read the website carefully you’ll see that you can always pull your money out of the system. The only cost in doing so is the cost of the transactions that sellaband has to pay to creditcard companies (2% or so) so there is no risk of losing money in any way.
2) Within a few months the first band has reached the limit and there are 6 bands with over 5000 dollars of believers money so they’re on their way
3) Someone mentioned that you lose your rights to the music. I would suggest you check out a typical contract that a band gets at a label when they are not famous ‘yet’. I can guarantee you that it ain’t half of what a band gets at sellaband. I think this explains the high quality of the music of the bands on sellaband.
4) Sellaband is created with a no lose situation in mind for all players involved.
The artists can always go and sign a deal with a label if they can get a better deal, but if they think they can raise the money and they will they’ll get a great quality CD with 5000 of them around the world (that’s a good start of being noticed and a great publicity to begin with).
The believers get a CD for 10 dollars (that’s not expensive) with a potential upside of earning extra on their ‘investment’. They can always get their money back until the band reaches the 50k limit and then they are guaranteed of a CD. Furthermore, if one of these bands becomes a success and you have invested in them you are truly one of it real fans from the start. How cool is that? I bet the band will be loyal to you too (backstage passes?, autographed CDs, ….)
True, I’ve been involved in the establishment of sellaband, but I can guarantee you that there is no catch. Sellaband is created by music lovers with a passion. If we turn it profitable at some point even we will have not lost out.
Just go to the website and see the responses of the believers and the artists and decide for yourself.
Regards,
A true believer
Nima
Spellbox has been having a blast on sellaband. What a great way to be discovered by new fans from around the globe!
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