Sell Yourself Off? Sellaband Will Help You Get Believers?

By
mdave
– March 26, 2007Posted in: Music Business

A temp detour from the “Standing Out in Crowd” series (Pt1, Pt2) of posts because something else caught my eye this weekend. I came across this interesting concept via TrendWatching.com (Good reading) about a new website that allows artists to literally sell pieces of themselves to their fans. SellaBand.com allows fans or as the site says believers purchase part of the band to support their CD project. For as little as $10 you can become a believer of a band and when they read 5000 believers they use the money and record their album. The fans aka believers get a copy of the album when completed. After they reach the number no more fans can buy in as a believer. When the album is done you can download the songs for free and the artist partnered with SellaBand.com split the advertising profits.

Digging deeper I see only 4 artists (Nemesea, Clubworld, Second Person, Clemence) have hit the 5000 believer list or raised $50,000. Looking at their charts which are rated by the amount of believers you have it seems there is a good amount of artists the reach $6000 and most are from Europe. Course thats where the website is based. The site uses social networking to encourage fans to spread the word, become believers helping the artist via word of mouth; which is the best form of marketing.

I’m indifferent to this concept to be honest. There are positives like trying new business models along with using the leverage of hundreds of artists sending traffic to SellaBand.com which could translate into new fans. But I don’t believe that advertising isn’t going to replace buying music anytime soon. I think a hybrid such as you can become a believer if you miss out on that then you can download a song or two then if you like then the full album can be $9.99 following the iTunes download model.

So do you think SellaBand.com will work? Why not just pre-sell a CD project yourself instead? Why not just ask your fan base to help spread the word? Why does it cost $50,000 to make an album? I know artists that have made fantastic records for under $10,000. Anyway if you’re an artist what are your thoughts? Do you find it kind of creepy having believers?

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About mdave

David has been using computers to create his visions since the early days of the Apple II. When the world wide web hit he dove in head first learning HTML and building his first websites. After spending a few years at a software services firm in Milwaukee he moved to Nashville and shortly after the Music Industry grabbed hold. He joined the Country Music Association as webmaster designing, building and managing the CMA Awards, CMA Music Festival and corporate websites for the 8 years. He started their social media reach-out and when he left the CMA could reach over 50,000 fans directly. David currently freelances by day, codes by night along with producing/hosting the Nashville Tech Feed a technology podcast. David was named by Billboard Magazine as one of the top 140 people in the Music Industry to follow on Twitter. , Facebook and Twitter