Crowd-funding hits the right notes

Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released on a pay-what-you-like basis. Image credit Daniele Dalledonne

ArtistShare describes itself as “the internet’s first fan funding platform” on its website. It was set up in 2000 by musician Brian Camelio as a response to “the threat of digital piracy and the futility of digital rights management for music”. Musicians on its books have since won six Grammy awards, including Maria Schneider herself, who became the first musician to win a Grammy with an album that was only available online.

ArtistShare is part of a growing trend within the music industry of bands departing from the traditional major label path. The crowd-funding philosophy of ArtistShare also forms the basis of websites such as Sellaband, which allows fans to fund professional endeavours in return for incentives like special access to the band or having their name included in the project’s credits or album sleeve notes.

Bristol-based Kochari is one such musician to distribute his work on music site Bandcamp. He has not set a price for any of his work on the site, and feels sites like Bandcamp are changing the dynamic of the music industry. “I’ve discovered so much music through it that I never would have heard before and you can really connect to your audience on a personal level,” he says.

At the other end of the scale, Radiohead released their In Rainbows album in 2007 and also allowed fans to pay whatever they wanted for it. Meanwhile, internationally known Amanda Palmer, formerly of The Dresden Dolls, raised almost $1.2m through a Kickstarter project involving close to 25,000 contributors. She elaborated on the crowd-funding concept in a TED talk in early 2013: “When you connect with them, people want to help you.”

The solution was, she said, to look at the problem in a new way: “I think we’ve been obsessed with the wrong question: ‘how do we make people pay for music?’ What if we started asking: ‘how do we let people pay for music?’”