Sell A Band

equation - Chilly in Paris'- on SellaBand

I found this one while listening to one of my regular podcasts of Digital Planet: What a brilliant idea! Yet another excellent use of the Internet and microfunding. Musicians and performers (Artists) present their stuff on the site (songs and sometimes videos) in the hope of earning $50,000 to go in to the studio and record. Once they're reached the magic amount they are provided with an A&R person and a producer and a recording studio and they make their CD. Afterwards the CD is sold online, 3 songs are available for free downloads and the rest of the individual songs are also sold as downloadable files. The profits for the sales of the CDs and the sales of the song downloads are split amongst the Artists, SellABand and the Believers.

Believers (you and I) purchase "parts" of the $50,000 fund for an artists at a rate of $10 per part (therefore 5,000 parts). In return the believer will receive a limited edition copy of the CD, a portion of the sales profits based on their number of parts and, most importantly, participates in the development, marketing and discovery of new artists. In most cases the Artists actually send some form of existing CD or demo CD to their believers as soon as they buy some parts so the believer doesn't have to wait until the Artist reaches the magic amount.

Sell A Band provides all sorts of tools for promoting the artists on believers' web sites, e-mails and such.

I became a believer right away and you can find my believer's page. After spending some time listening to various artists on the site, which I must say was both a lot of fun and quite enlightening, I became a believer of the group Equation which I quite enjoy. I then went to their web site and downloaded lots of their live music as MP3 files. I uploaded those music files on to our home music server and have been listening to them over and over again for quite some time know. Hypnotic. They then sent me a demo CD with a few live tracks and even a few videos of their live performances which I have also uploaded on to our server so we can watch them on the living room television and on the other computers in the house. I have become a big fan.

I must say it's a wonderful and unique opportunity to be able to communicate directly with the musicians themselves about their music, their performances, their goals, their message, their dreams and to feel like an active part in the experience. In some ways it's similar to the Salon des Vignerons Indépendants, which we attend regularly and loyally, where one gets to communicate directly with the winemaker bypassing all of the various levels of the distribution process.

There are some wondefully positive things the Internet can provide to the world and this is one of them!