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SXSW panel: ‘Crowdfunding Music: Raising Money From Your Fans’
Panelists: Yancey Strickler - Kickstarter, Jamin Brophy-Warren - Kill Screen Magazine, Dick Huey - Toolshed, Ian Rogers - Topspin, Allison Weiss
The gist: Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter offer new ways for musicians to not only finance their projects, but to build lasting, enduring personal relationships with their fans that will pay big dividends as they continue their careers. Although the digital music revolution means people are hesitant to pay for just music these days, fans are happy to pay money to help support an artist if they feel like they have a stake in the project. And music fans still appreciate a cool, tactile reward for getting involved. If artists offer incentives and do a good job communicating with their fans through updates - and make an effort to be creative - they’ll find that their fans will frequently support them.
Takeaways: Crowdfunding is not a silver bullet for the financial woes of musicians struggling to fund their albums, tours or other projects - it’s one more tool in the toolbox. Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler argued that bands that operate on multiple fronts, using Kickstarter to pay for some creative projects while still using more traditional means for other goals (noting Shearwater and its companion book to album “The Golden Archipelago” as an example), are most successful. To succeed through crowdfunding, bands and artists such as Allison Weiss need to hone in on connecting with their audience and making them feel like part of an adventure. Ways to do that include creative incentives that people can’t get anywhere else or any other way aside from contributing. Ultimately, the key to a successful crowdfunded project is intimate connection between the artist and their fans. Often, the hardest part of a successfully crowdfunded project is simply getting the news out there - Strickler noted
that if a Kickstarter project reaches 25 percent funding it gets fully funded 92 percent of the time. Cheap incentives also help - projects with incentives costing $15 or less have a 60 percent success rate, compared to the standard 40 percent.
Quotes: “A lot of crowdfunding is about empathy, so instead of buying into a product a backer is buying into the person. Success is about you and who you are and what you’re doing and not market forces.” Yancey Strickler.
“We all know there is no silver bullet for the record industry. Crowdfunding is the not one thing that’s going to solve the industry.” Ian Rogers.
“The age of one-size-fits-all products is over. It’s about fan segmentation now.” Ian Rogers.
“It’s not that people are refusing to pay for music. They’re just refusing to pay for a commodity product that they can have for free. You have to offer them something extra and at a fair value.” Ian Rogers
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