Kickstarter / Bandcamp / etc - C or D?

A good business model that adapts to these topsy-turvy download-y times? Or tantamount to groveling? Also, which is better?

They both seem pretty great to me, but also very different. Does bandcamp involve funding?

bandcamp and kickstarter appear to be two very different things xpost

Does bandcamp involve funding?

no

Oh, I see. Bandcamp is the 'pay what you like' site, then?

Friend of mine is funding their thesis film thru Kickstarter (pretty successfully, it seems)

pledgemusic is something similar to kickstarter but just specific to music

right now you can help fund the new cast and cornershop records

aw. i have a bittersweet feeling about kickstarter. it is cool and all, but we had $1400 pledged towards the soulstreamers which would have totally helped get us off the ground, but we lost it all since we didn't meet the entire goal. it was sad because at least with the $1400 we would have paid off the trailer and been partially on the way there...

what was your goal?

Bandcamp has been a solid 'C'. Kudos to them for not adding in a whole bunch of myspace/facebook 'networking' guff and having an A+ stats section.

What is Kickstarter?

funding site for the arts

good if you have fans

which means it would be useless for me

I mean, we were very short of our goal. I am just saying that the funds would have help, even if it wouldn't have gotten us on the road.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344806759/soulstreamers-a-mobile-music-project-to-keep-vinyl

helped, obv.

you did pretty fucking good, it seems to me. Sorry you didn't make it!

Now who here wants to pay for my next film?

Yeah, we did really well. That was my point. We could have used that money and instead lost all of it because it is all or nothing with Kickstarter. :( In retrospect, this project would already be on it's way if we had that $1400 back then so I guess we should have made the goal lower. Instead, we still don't have a renovated trailer and we missed out on $1400 that people were wanting us to have.

The Mekons just funded a movie doc through kickstarter. They had some big name literary and musicial assistance

I would pay for new record by favorite artist X. Specially after all the downloading I have done in my life. Roky Erickson should do this, would be rad.

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.

Yes, you get to keep whatever you raise

in my experience (that is, watching/contributing to other people's stuff) for kickstarter you really need a decent fanbase coming in. if you're really lucky the kickstarter people will feature you, but you tend to need the former first

that said, if you have that it's great. know someone who raised >31K from an originally 8K project

yeah Kickstarter is tricky because their whole thing is they don't want you to raise half your goal and have a bunch of people still expecting you to finish your project without the whole amount you needed to get it done. you CAN kind of cheat the system by having some 3rd party help you meet the goal as kind of a loan, so that you can at least collect what had been pledged legitimately, which I'm not saying whether or not that's what happened with my project, but I'm just saying.

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

Anyone know if there's a way to make a playlist for my Bandcamp purchases a la Spotify? I have quite a decent collection and a lot of it isn't available on Spotify. I'd like to be able to put these into a playlist so I can have these playing as I work or on my phone, but it seems that's not really a thing Bandcamp offers, which seems like a real shame

playlists suck. Bandcamp is for album listening.

Bandcamp itself doesn't allow that but there is some kind of third-party app that does it. I don't remember the name right now.

xp, not if you've got lots of single track purchases

Try this:
https://bndcmpr.co/

xp

good point

Do a lot of people only listen to BC purchases on BC? It has never really occurred to me to use it as a platform like that (I always download and import to itunes)

I assume they use the bandcamp app to stream on their phones

ah right. Honestly apple's "music" app is so shitty I might end up doing that too soon enough

Yeah I download everything to my music drive for local play and if I stream just stream off the app when I'm not at home. Very very occasionally I'll stream via my desktop setup.

My hatred of iTunes is well documented. Also, I tend to move from device to device

thanks for the link Jordan!!

It's wild that I can be logged into Bandcamp on my phone, laptop and iPad and have different shopping carts for each one.

I don't use wishlists, I just add things to my shopping cart when I know I want to buy them and then wait to check out until I'm at my laptop.

Bandcamp I just want to give you money, please take it.

use the wishlist. it's great. it does what you want to do.

FINE

Yah, why would you not want to use it? Wishlist works great.

I guess the new player interface on iOS is cool but I am wary of further feature creep

now I'm using the wishlist feature and it's working great and I have a new problem

Huh.

Apparently Bandcamp got bought by is joining Epic Games (Fortnite)?

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epic/

Wondering what this means for the payment system.

Well I'm not seeing any NFT mentions so that's a good sign.

is this an acquisition or just a partnership? it's really vague about that and it's the part that matters most which makes me assume its the worse case

Yeah, it's the vagueness that unsettles me, plus the bit about "push(ing) development forward" on the payment system. Having seen how Fortnite does it's payment system, this could be an adjustment.

I was trying to figure that out too, it's very odd. I assume that it's a euphemism for an acquisition, from the "we're joining them" language.

And while over the years we’ve heard from other companies who wanted us to join them...

Not the other way around, or "wanted to work together", etc.

Best case scenario is Epic just wants to use Bandcamps model/software/payment system for selling games, and leaves Bandcamp the hell alone?

There's absolutely no way, if the payment system or software changes, that it doesn't go the other direction.

Epic's game store is huge, although Steam is still considerably larger. I think the monthly user numbers are something like 50 million, and they've dropped millions of dollars on time-limited giveaways of games just to lure people into their ecosystem.

I think the big play here is that Epic can use music as another wedge against Apple not allowing in-app purchases that aren't funneled through Apple's payment system or allowing apps that aren't through the App Store.

Yeah the whole Epic/Apple thing is what I’ve been thinking about here.

https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader
someone might find this useful, it's a way to download your entire collection
because the individual album method takes forEVAH

Ned to thread!

Fuck yes, hate buying a label discography and then needing to wait and press DOWNLOAD on 75 different items.

doesn't really seem like the epic acquisition changed anything, as far as i've seen

Yeah, I'm glad there's been no major enshittification so far.

Just wait

They're still letting me write for them, clearly a disaster wait hold on.

Deeply concerned about Bandcamp, Patreon and Mixcloud, thankfully all three are still ok, but this can't last forever.

Why Patreon?

Because it seems like any of these companies are liable to be bought out & ruined by a venture capitalist. They have made the right calls so far, on the whole.

patreon succeeds despite itself and its ownership imo

Only problem with Bandcamp I have had recently is really slow downloads every now and then, which is annoying when you’re trying to download 50 albums on a Bandcamp Friday.

Bandcamp unionized:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bandcamp-union-1234695308/

Nice!

Initial petition delivered, public campaign call on Monday:

https://bit.ly/bcu-update

Love BC
Use it all day
Just stop adding shit
Not going to end well

otm

adding what?

needless "functionality" and bloatware (guessing at what calstars meant here but that's my take)

Ned's link is to register for a Zoom webinar FYI

yeah IDGI

doh

it’s the link to a public meeting to rally support for the bandcamp employee union afaict

Yup!