Tag: Crowdfunding
Posted inStartups
Livamp wants to connect musicians with investors
Livamp is the latest attempt to explore how crowdfunding can work for musicians.
In this case, it encourages people to invest money in emerging artists in return for an actual stake in their career – minority shares of the copyrights in one or more songs for a certain period of time.
Posted inNews
Kickstarter saves Drip music subscriptions service
Earlier this year, music-label subscriptions service Drip announced that it was closing down. Now, on the eve of the planned closure, Kickstarter has swooped in to save it.
“Many of us at Kickstarter have admired Drip over the years. At heart, we’ve been on similar paths,” wrote Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler in a blog post. “Strengthening the bonds between artists and audiences, and fostering the conditions for a more vibrant creative culture is at the core of our work at Kickstarter, too.”
Posted inNews
Magna Entertainment takes major stake in PledgeMusic
New York-based investment firm Magna has taken a “major position” in fan-funding service PledgeMusic.
The size of its investment remains undisclosed, although it was made through the company’s Magna Entertainment division, which is overseen by former Maverick Records and London Records exec Russell Rieger.
Rieger was actually appointed as a PledgeMusic director in February 2015. He and Magna CEO Joshua Sason are now two of the three current PledgeMusic directors alongside the company’s co-founder Benji Rogers.
Posted inNews, Startups
Korean live-music startup MyMusicTaste raises $10m
Remember when Songkick was promoting its Detour feature, which enabled fans to band together to request a gig in their nearest town by a favourite band?
Korean startup MyMusicTaste is mining similar territory, and it’s just raised $10m for its expansion plans.
According to TechCrunch, it has organised 80 concerts in 32 cities since its launch in 2013, with 500k fans currently on its service.
Posted inNews
Kickstarter backers have pledged $157m for music projects
Kickstarter has reached a significant milestone: $2bn of pledges to projects on the crowdfunding website. The second billion took 19 months, compared to 58 months for the first billion.
The company has broken down the pledges by category, revealing that 42,193 music projects have launched since Kickstarter began, with 21,265 of them successfully funded. 1.7m backers have pledged a total of $157m to music projects, behind only games ($412.4m), technology ($360m), design ($351.7m) and film & video ($302.1m).
Posted inNews
PledgeMusic shares stats to celebrate sixth anniversary
Fan-funding platform PledgeMusic is six years old this year, and to celebrate, CEO Benji Rogers has published some stats on how artists are performing on the service.
More than 1m people have accounts on PledgeMusic, spending an average of $55 per transaction. “For our targeted campaigns, we see our emerging artists hitting and exceeding their projected goal 87% of the time, and our frontline acts 90%. Combined they exceed their intended goal by an average of 12%,” wrote Rogers.
Posted inAnalysis, News
Patreon security breach includes users’ personal details
Crowdfunding service Patreon has reported a significant security breach that included personal information on some of its users. The breach happened on 28 September via a debug version of the Patreon website that was publicly visible.
“There was unauthorized access to registered names, email addresses, posts, and some shipping addresses. Additionally, some billing addresses that were added prior to 2014 were also accessed,” explained CEO Jack Conte in a blog post.
Posted inNews
Kickstarter takes steps to never ‘sell or go public’
We’re all familiar with the hoped-for trajectory of most tech startups: several rounds of funding followed by an exit through acquisition or IPO. Crowdfunding firm Kickstarter has taken the bold move of aiming for neither of those conclusions: reincorporating the company this weekend as a “public benefit corporation” to ensure that the company’s motivations must remain more about social impact than lucrative exits to come.
Posted inAnalysis, News
‘Popcorn Time for music’ app Aurous abandons crowdfunding
Earlier this month, we reported on the upcoming launch of Aurous, a music-focused filesharing app whose slick interface – by which we mean an interface heavily inspired by Spotify – was already seeing it hailed as a “Popcorn Time for music”.
(Popcorn Time being the film-torrenting app that’s been making waves within the movie industry in recent months.)
Aurous would pull songs from websites as well as torrents, selling advertising to fund its business, although not royalty payments to the creators of the actual music being shared on it.
Aurous sounded like the kind of app that would be developed and released by a small team of developers, with its nature ruling out traditional forms of funding. Yet last week those developers took the surprising step of launching a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, trying to raise $25k to “help bring Aurous to your phone” following its desktop release.
Posted inNews
Neil Young admits to ‘lack of resources’ for Pono
Neil Young has admitted that Pono has a “lack of resources” that is frustrating his ambitions for global expansion for his hi-res downloads store and music player. “We have no […]
Posted inNews
Michael Bolton turns to the crowd through PledgeMusic
And you say, all your hope is gone, and what’s the use in trying. What you need is to have some faith, shake off those sad blues, and get yourself […]