Kickstarter / Bandcamp / etc - C or D?

ok

I'm releasing my next album through bandcamp, I think. We're doing two songs a month for six months and then we'll actually have a vinyl pressed and sell that, but everyone downloads everything anyway so why not make it easy on them, frankly.

kickstarter: yeah good if you have fans or family. a friend financed the mxing of her album via kickstarter, but I think her family kicked in a lot of it. she was also relentless about nagging people on facebook which I'd have a problem doing.

isn't a one time ilxor heavily involved w/ kickstarter? anyway a ton of local (athens, ga) acts have used it, i think one even got mentioned in some times writeup about kickstarter; alot of local acts (generally the more redneck punk ones) regard it w/ disgust. it's basically a venture capital model applied to arts charity right? totally think it's a good thing.

if you hit your target on kickstarter and get more pledged, do you get to keep that? would be handy if you set a lower target to at least get some cash rolling in, maybe.

― cereal bad boy (haitch), Monday, 20 December 2010 04:00 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yes, you get to keep whatever you raise

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

Which one time ilxor?

i love bandcamp. a lot of my favorite bands are on it, i've discovered new bands through it, and i'm putting my own stuff there instead of myspace.

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

― The Jolly Roget's Thesaurus (S-), Monday, December 20, 2010 1:12 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you can't donate to your own project (at least not with your own name/bank account -- obviously you can have a middleman or something)

i like Band Camp a lot too btw, a lot of the local acts i cover have taken to it and it's become a really nice to way to keep track of artists who previously i had to go on goddamn MySpace to hear new stuff from

bandcamp is great.

i'm deeply suspicious of bands raising money to make albums via kickstarter though. maybe i'm just being a hater, but there's something weird about wanting your friends & fans pay for the entirety of your recording + mixing + mastering + duplication.

the other angle is that the band kickstarters that i've seen present it as "recording is expensive!". while i'm all about keeping studios in business, it seems like asking people to pay for your studio time is the easy way out when everyone else is buying some gear of their own, learning how to use it, and becoming at least somewhat self-sufficient.

But a lot of the Kickstarter projects I've looked at will promise you a copy of the final product with your donation, so it's essentially like paying a few extra bucks above the cost of the cd to see that the cd gets made in the first place.

I'm in for Marissa Nadler's new album through Kickstarter. Was in the I Like Trains pledgemusic one too, but Marissa's seems better value.

yeah...w/ music projects i think using Kickstarter treads a fine line. because either you have a fanbase and probably don't NEED to ask for the money (or wouldn't if you'd managed your career a little better or had slightly better luck), or you have no substantial fanbase and you're just kind of asking family and friends to help you make a CD they probably won't listen to. my project was a research-intensive book project, i don't know if that exactly makes my use of it better in any way, i may be a hypocrite, i'm just saying.

I think the chief problem I have with Kickstarter, at least as far as funding music projects goes, is that musicians are often terrible at managing money. Someone I know in a middling indie band (who shall remain nameless) put up a Kickstarter a year or so and got a fair amount of money to put towards the recording of a new album. One year on and there's no sign of the album, and I see him getting asked questions about it on Facebook all the time, with vague "it's coming soon" promises from him in return. I don't exactly know what he's done with the money, but I'm pretty sure most of it's been blown on boozing and partying.

So, if you were going to do something anyway with your own money, why not get a Kickstart thing, get some peeps to donate $, then donate to your 'goal' yourself if you're short and you'll be less out of pocket in the short term?

― The Jolly Roget's Thesaurus (S-), Monday, December 20, 201

That was our idea, but at the last minute when I tried to do that, I was made aware that I couldn't. I was trying to find someone - anyone - to donate (even just in theory) the last bit to make it happen but to no avail.

yeah there's a lot of ins and outs of how KS works that sometimes you don't know or think about until you've started your project -- really that's the main reason i'm being pretty forthright in this thread about how mine went down, in case the info helps anyone else here down the road

Trying again?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344806759/soulstreamers

Oh, I know Heather! At least I know her from the store in Knoxville. Rad store, great gal. I'm tapped but I know some folks who might be into this - will alert 'em. This is a really cool idea.

Friendly advice - I'd offer some sort of physical product (I'm assuming these mixes you're offering are sent via email?) in exchange for pledges.

Thanks for that offer! You are very sweet. The mixes offered as incentives, though, are the actual mixes named on kickstarter and recorded live by the three of us. We send out the actual mix with our own covers and such.

Are you in Knoxville? When did I meet you? I live in Kill Devil Hills now, though. I left Lost and Found in December to move out here.

Verbena dudes / Wooden Wand just launched one of these

whoa. just found out that one of the cofounders of kickstarter is a guy i went to college with. worked at the college radio station with him. he also posted on ILX for a while.

started this thread e.g.

New from the DFA...

Yancey is one of the kickstarter cofounders?

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/ff_kickstarter/all/1

yeah i thought it was common knowledge that yancey was one of the main KS guys. also i always thought of him as a pretty major part of ILM for however many of the early years he was posting.

I read his on-again/off-again blog for a couple years before I even found ILM and was glad to find him here. Was disappointed when he stopped posting. Cool that that's what he's up to these days.

kickstarter kickin knowledge

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lkck96gjE71qz4ede.png
Projects that reach 30% of their funding goal succeed more than 90% of the time. You can see that as the line turns green, the percent of projects that succeed approaches 100%.

that's kind of a "no duh" statistic though, isn't it?

i mean the curve could be steeper or flatter i guess but it's kind of like saying "people who grow to be 5'9" are more likely to end up over 6 feet tall"

we were all 3 feet tall once

i mean the curve could be steeper or flatter i guess but it's kind of like saying "people who grow to be 5'9" are more likely to end up over 6 feet tall"

― hong does your geirden gro (some dude), Friday, April 29, 2011 7:20 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark

i mean, no, not at all. it's more like saying "people that grow to be 3 feet tall almost always end up 10 feet tall."

fwiw on the clickthrough there's way more

yeah, i guess that's a more accurate way of putting it. just seems like a pretty predictable and logical stat that they're dropping like a revelation or truth bomb imo.

idk i mean i phrased it the way i did because the idea that projects reaching 30% get funded fully almost every time is really surprising to me, i would have expected there are a lot of projects that stalled out at higher numbers, or that if there was a threshold like this it would have been much higher--"get to 30% & statistically you're basically there" is way more surmountable as a goal than "promote this until you are all the way there, cause it won't happen otherwise"

btw al i'm following this stuff/bumping this thread cause some ppl i run with are thinking about moving to kickstarter to fund some art projects and i actually wanted to tap yr experience on this, so def don't let me make it sound like i know what i'm talking about.

haha no it's cool -- i guess i have a different way of looking at how KS tends to work for people but i don't know if it's necessarily because of my personal experience with it. but sure lemme know if you have any questions.

By itself, the graphic doesn't mean a lot. For example, what's the breakdown is dollar/values
as goals.

How does it skew when comparing projects that ask for trivial funding as opposed to those requesting more serious money? What's the impact of publicity or recommendation by big name linkage?

Also, from the pov of the non-user, there's no way to gauge how hard 30 percent is to reach. Is it just a meaningless pass through point on the way to full funding? As presented here, it looks fairly ambiguous without clarification.

seems like people are more reluctant to be the first ones to jump in, or to fund something that looks like a futile effort, but happy to keep the momentum going and give it that last push.

that i think is true, but perhaps less true than that imo your project either has what it takes to go the long haul, or is just nowhere near it, with little in between.

Ok my friends all use bandcamp and soundcloud, but I've been doing the mediafire for years now, but I'd like to branch out. What are the differences between the two? Which is better? I really like the soundcloud presentation, and the streaming embedded files, but I wouldn't mind being able to charge for things. Is that a bandcamp thing only? Also, does anyone ever make money off it? Most of my stuff is covers, too, so I don't know if those sites will allow them. Opinions? Suggestions?

i think soundcloud is way better for sharing, but is not geared towards selling at all - you can link to where your stuff is for sale but can't sell directly on soundcloud.

you can share things fine on bandcamp and it is probably a lot more flexible though. i think there is no good reason not to use both.

Also, does anyone ever make money off it?

i'd say we're not in the black yet but it has definitely been worth having

Are there any reasons to choose soundcloud? Other than prettier embed graphics?

well, one good thing is there's an android app for it, and bandcamp won't stream on android

also soundcloud 'feels' better for non-releases, demos etc as bandcamp is more geared towards "albums", but that's more just my opinion

also the social networking aspect of SC that BC pretty much doesn't have, if that floats one's boat

Can you sell albums/songs on Soundcloud?

not directly, but you can link to stores/bandcamp etc

I think i post new stuff more frequently on bandcamp, just like the layout better. soundcloud i do mixes (tho also mixcloud now), covers, "singles"

hey, thought i'd just do a little bit of shameless self-promotion...i've started a kickstarter to get a digital compilation i just put out for free pressed on vinyl. exclusive tracks from amen dunes, wooden wand, sore eros, xray eyeballs, the renderers, black eagle child and bunches more. there's a link from the kickstarter page to download it. alright, back to your regularly scheduled thread.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1671364068/press-blackburns-various-deficiencies-vol-2-on-vin

a more important chart

http://static7.businessinsider.com/image/4db9a1cd49e2ae83320e0000/kickstarter-graph.jpg

totaling funding, projects in aggregate.

4. TOO MANY EMAILS

Yeah the emails are a bit much. One feature I’d like to se that might fix that is auto-wish listing new releases from artists / labels you follow

1. recent change to Stripe

I'm a little confused about this one. People seem to be asserting that you'll have to buy albums with Stripe, which I don't think is the case; you'll still be able to buy music with PayPal. But Bandcamp wants to pay artists and labels with Stripe, which isn't a problem for me (that's how I get paid from Substack so I'm already set up with it), but it appears there are many countries where Stripe doesn't work, and many artists in those countries are worried about getting paid going forward, so that's bad.

Are they thrifty enough to keep paypal payments separate from stripe, or do they just eat the double transaction cost by accepting paypal through stripe, or do they make artists eat it?

They make artists eat it.

Maybe I don’t quite understand the question but that’s generally what they do.

https://bandcamp.com/bandcamp_payments

So if they're consolidating payments through stripe, and stripe is not eating the paypal fees, the artist will have to eat not only the stripe transaction fee but also the paypal fee, so unless they're getting some amazing volume paypal discount through stripe, it seems like artists will get less, not more under the new regime, but it sounds like paypal is raising fees in any case.

Ned! Why have you chosen to stop writing for Bandcamp Daily?

I'm curious about the whole crop of bandcamp alternatives: ampwall, mirlo, subvert...
I may be forgetting one... anyone have any experience with any of them?

see here

The alternaBandcamps -- search/destroy etc.

(that prompted this revive, to be clear)

Ned! Why have you chosen to stop writing for Bandcamp Daily?

This decision was made some time back, so it's not new, and to refer to sleeve's revive for the thread:

2. laying off all the people who flagged Nazi artist content/uploads

This was not all of it but it was part of the letting go of employees in general that happened after Epic Games, having used Bandcamp essentially as a pawn in its court case with Apple, sold it to the Songtradr guy. As a number of the people let go because of that sale were, among other things, prime organizers of the Bandcamp workers union, it all left me uncomfortable. I had to think about it for a few days, being clear, but when I was specifically asked if I could keep contributing, I said I didn't feel right in doing that and have not done so since. (If this helps as a point of comparison: Shfl, where a lot of recent writing of mine this decade has surfaced, is strictly a one-person project where the owner does all the coding etc himself and supports various freelance contributions.)

I just got the email from Bandcamp about Stripe--fortunately I already had Stripe from my completely dormant Buy Me A Coffee account, so I was able to use that.

ah. cheers sleeve

This was not all of it but it was part of the letting go of employees in general that happened after Epic Games, having used Bandcamp essentially as a pawn in its court case with Apple, sold it to the Songtradr guy. As a number of the people let go because of that sale were, among other things, prime organizers of the Bandcamp workers union, it all left me uncomfortable.

FTR, I made the exact same decision. When one particular editor, who I wrote something like 70 pieces for between 2016 and 2023, was pushed out the door, and the editor who remained acted like a gaping asshole about it, I decided I wasn't going to write for them anymore. I didn't make a big announcement, I just stopped pitching.

thanks Ned, and unperson

I wish bandcamp editorial would write about my music! Been meaning to ask who I need to pester to make that happen. Anyone have ideas?

There's something in the help files about submitting your music there.

Many thousands of us want that, I've sent some music to a few of the writers but I don't think I've ever gotten in there (maybe once when a friend was writing a dance music column).

Im sure. Figured I’d ask anyway.

I have seen acquaintances be featured in spite of their music being (pardon me for saying this) extraordinary dull. Thought maybe I had a chance.

There's always a chance! My approach is usually to figure out contact info for the writer and send a personal message, and once in a blue moon it works out. Writers on this thread may have different views, lol.

Yeah, your best odds come from choosing a writer you think might be into your stuff and finding a way to reach out to them. They will pitch their editor, or maybe include you in a monthly column (BC publishes a lot of columns now.)

good lord, the download bandwidth is even more broken than usual for a BC Friday

Is that why the landing page is not showing my collection?

I assume so yeah, same here

idg why anyone would make the effort to create playlists for V0 quality streams. I find I rarely play back purchased music from the Bandcamp site, rather it's the wishlist that gets the attention. really wish they hadn't shoved that column over in the ui to make space for the playlists

thoughts on Bandcamp Clubs? I'm not thrilled by monetized communities but I guess I won't shame anyone who finds value in this concept

Also Juno Downloads just abruptly shut down: http://musictech.com/news/industry/juno-download-shock-closure/

Can you subscribe to others playlists? I see that as a good feature.

not interested in creating them myself, but as said upthread, I normally go foraging in my wishlist which is mainly recommendations and stuff from bandcamp daily/radio.

So being able to dig in to some peoples curated playlists would be a good feature especially if dynamic.