Music Ally

Sellaband is a fan-funding website based in Holland. Since its launch in August 2006, SellaBand has coordinated recording sessions for 34 artists or acts who had their albums funded by their fans with over USD $3,000,000 invested so far. This week the company announced that it’ll be funding the next album from Public Enemy frontman Chuck D. We asked Sellaband’s UK head to talk us through how the Sellaband model has changed and what it means for artists and labels looking for a deal.

“In the last three years, we have proved that the SellaBand fan funded music model works, with 34 artists raising their own recording budgets. But we also had a lot of people who said ‘We’d love to do it, but we can’t give up any of our rights – we’re too big’. Other people didn’t need to make a record: they wanted to raise money for other touring or promotion. And then some people didn’t want to pay incentives to their Believers – they wanted to do other things.

“So that’s three things we’re changing with our new custom model, which is now in operation. The target budgets will now start at $10,000 and go up to $100,000, and the minimum incentive is now a download. And artists can raise money for whatever they want: touring, promotion – we even have someone raising money to put on their own festival next year.

“It’s the logical evolution for the fan-funded model, which has been unjustly criticised in the past. A lot of people have seen the whole music business as being about getting a major label deal. If you can’t get a major deal, get an indie deal. And if you can’t do that, then do it fan-funded. It’s been unfairly seen as the third way for artists who aren’t good or popular enough to get a deal.

“But now people are realising that there aren’t many advantages in a deal – a major label is going to want more and more of your income for giving you less and less. Management can’t fund these things because they don’t have deep enough pockets. But your fans will.

“So, we’re going to start attracting bigger name artists, and that will in turn bring in their fanbases and friends, which we can start merging with the established SellaBand community. We even have a number of labels coming in, who’ll have their own custom pages on SellaBand. The new model will suit management companies, promoters and record producers too – it’s really quite a flexible thing. We’ve got a cutting-edge jazz label getting involved, and I’d love to see orchestras using it… anybody anywhere.

“We’ll be taking a 10% success fee on whatever funding target people achieve, with no extra admin fees. As before, the service itself is free. We considered a subscription fee on top of that, but we did our sums and it made no sense. We want to have a continual turnover of people coming in and raising money in a clean and straightforward manner, and we’ll oversee that it’s spent correctly. Will that present a challenge if this really takes off? Absolutely, but we’ll see how it works – it’s a jump in the dark.

“The fact that artists are keeping 100% of all their rights is important – and people who are savvy understand that. They also have the flexibility to determine which incentives they will offer their fans who fund them. But even when you keep your assets, the problem is understanding how and when to monetize them – it’s a challenge that everybody is facing, established and new artists alike. But if you don’t have them in the first place, who knows what can happen? But this has to be artist-driven – what we don’t want is what happened in the early days of SellaBand, when people saw it as an X-Factor talent contest thing, and about becoming a star. But it’s not about being a star, it’s about going to the next level, rather than an instant payoff.

“We see this fitting in well with the fantastic tools that are out there for artists, with the digital marketing companies. ReverbNation is getting better and better, for example. A lot of them offer very specific things for specific artists though – the danger is that they give people tools that enable them to say ‘Hey! Here we are!’ But with too many people waving it’s hard to pick them out. But we’ve seen the SellaBand community consistently pick out great talent – Ellie Williams, for example – even when the artist had no existing fanbase.

“Still, we never thought of websites like Bandstocks and SliceThePie as competition. Bandstocks is very much filtered – you have to be chosen – while SliceThePie isn’t fully international due to gaming regulations. But the winner with all these different models has to be the artist, and we’re going to see more and more people using fan-funding and all the other tools.

“But the important thing is this is about music, not technology. Our fan funding engine allows artists the freedom to enter into deals with any label, management company, or publisher and there are no advances to pay back. So in effect, artists maintain complete control over their career and have 100% freedom to create the music that they want to create.”

Adam Sieff is a record producer, guitar player, studio owner and more recently Director of Jazz for Sony Music. He also runs Sellaband in the UK.

Tags: chuck d, sellaband, sieff

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 8th, 2009 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Interviews, Music Ally Feature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.