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November 06, 2006
Invest in your favorite band, literally
Marrying traditional grassroots awareness with the Wall Street IPO formula, a new site called SellaBand.com is looking for music fans to help bands they believe in. The idea is to spread the financial risks behind new bands among its followers, called "believers," each who contribute $10 to the band's fund. Once $50,000 is raised the band records an album and presses 5,100 CDs - one per each believer and 100 for the band. The thinking that with each believer having a vested interest in the bands success, they will promote the group and eventually share in potential successes. The catch?
"A glance at SellaBand's newfangled business model reveals a record contract that would make Phil Spector proud: SellaBand retains the rights to all the band's masters for one year, with a cut of the publishing royalties in perpetuity. As for the believers, the bulk of your profit, such as it is, derives from the site's ad revenue and a portion of album sales."(WIRED)
Apparently this type of business model is called "crowdsourcing*." Penned by Jeff Howe (WIRED writer who authored the above article) and who covers this new Life 2.0 phenomenon on his Crowdsourcing blog. The subhead aptly claims: "tracking the rise of the amateur." The premise of SellaBand is an interesting one. Myspace is credited as an enormous marketing force for indie bands (too much so in Merry Swankster's opinion), but as long as Myspacers remain just buddies and not music buyers - Myspace sites will be relegated to just another artist website, slightly evolved.
SellaBand.com: Bands meet the money chase. The Nirvana baby is all growns up.
Read More:
"The Rise of Crowdsourcing" - By Jeff Howe
WIRED Issue 14.06 - June 2006
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*Crowdsourcing - It describes a business model akin to outsourcing, but relying sometimes upon unpaid or low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D (Wikipedia).
Posted by Merry Swankster at November 6, 2006 02:30 PM
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