PledgeMusic - going under and taking new music with it?

[visog]

So things not looking great for PledgeMusic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47015855

I've not been a particular fan of this site although did participate in the Allan Holdsworth 'Tales from the Vault' project.

I raise it here as it means it's another death knell for new music from established artists without a current deal with a major record company.

So the financials have reversed from the 70s and you only make money from touring. That's the popular wisdom. Are we stuffed from a new music perspective?

[MacDaddy]

According to the MU all payments will be made within 90 days. 

MU Pledge Music update

Edited January 30, 2019 by MacDaddy
Feckin autocorrect!

[visog]

Just now, MacDaddy said:

Account to the MU all payments will be made within 90 days. 

MU Pledge Music update

Good luck with that... 

[MacDaddy]

8 minutes ago, visog said:

So things not looking great for PledgeMusic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech

So the financials have reversed from the 70s and you only make money from touring. 

Wasn't that always the case? Record companies have always being notorious for dodgy record deals and ripping bands off. 

[Guest oZZma]

12 minutes ago, visog said:

So the financials have reversed from the 70s and you only make money from touring. That's the popular wisdom. Are we stuffed from a new music perspective?

No. Lots of bands have always had day jobs. Maybe now more bands will have day jobs. 

[Lozz196]

I must admit I’ve never really understood the Pledge thing anyway, it doesn’t cost that much to record an album and release it - as the sales come in you recoup your money pretty quickly.

[BigRedX]

15 hours ago, Lozz196 said:

I must admit I’ve never really understood the Pledge thing anyway, it doesn’t cost that much to record an album and release it - as the sales come in you recoup your money pretty quickly.

I'd agree with this.

In real terms it is cheaper than ever to record and release your music.

And you still need to already have a sizeable following to make schemes like PledgeMusic work for you, so I really can't see the point.

Maybe it's time for someone to do another Desperate Bicycles and see just how cheaply it is possible to record and release 500 copies of an album.

[visog]

Lozz & BigRed, Take your points financially but I think Pledge gave artists the reassurance up-front that there was an audience ready and waiting for the output. But you are right, there are different models to make new music economically. Not sure many artists are particularly willing to explore these different models... Maybe depends on their managers?

[Monkey Steve]

I've backed a few things on the site (see my other thread on this issue from a few days ago) and I think the reasons for using at are varied. 

For some bands it a platform that gets them wider exposure than doing it all themselves would provide - I've certainly backed bands that I wouldn't have heard of if it wasn't for PM.  And as an extension to that, it's also a very handy website for taking and processing orders.  And it also works with targets, so you know how much money you're going to get (current issues aside) and how much you need to spend to get everything done - if you don't hit your targets because nobody's going to buy your new album, you haven't wasted a few grand recording it and pressing hundreds of copies

For others I suspect it's a good way to pre-sell their stuff without having to pay distributors and record shops - PM charge 15% whereas between them the shops and distributors can take north of 50%...obviously this only works if PM actually pay up the band's 85%...

[BigRedX]

Mr Venom signed The Terrortones up to PledgeMusic when we first considered making an album, and I had a good look at the system to see what the pros and cons would be. I couldn't see any PledgeMusic "community" that would result in our campaign getting noticed or cross-promoted on the site itself.

In the end we decided not to use the service, because we wanted to make the album in our own time when we had the right songs to record and an when we were happy that we had the right versions recorded. Also IMO there is nothing sadder than a band with a PledgeMusic campaign who don't manage to hit even their most basic targets. From experience having punters say they would buy your album after a gig doesn't in any way guarantee a sale when said album becomes available.

The Terrortones album cost about £5k for 7 days recording, overdubbing and mixing, mastering all the tracks including a few extra that didn't make it onto the final release, packaging design and artwork, pressing 500 copies on vinyl, printing the packaging, and also making a promo video for one of the tracks and the first wave of promotion costs. We could have done it for a lot less (probably half the price at the most) if we had gone for CDs instead of vinyl and simplified the packaging, but we decided that the cost wasn't extravagant for a band that was out gigging every week and selling plenty of merch off the back of our gigging, plus divided between the band members it was by no means an unobtainable amount.

As for sales and distribution, IME "independent" bands (who would normally be PledgeMusic's main customers) sell far more product at gigs then they ever do on line. For The Terrortones our total income from on-line sales of physical product, downloads and streaming was less than 10% of our sales of CDs and vinyl at gigs, and nearly all of those came through BandCamp who only take 10% of your sale price (as opposed to the 15% PM take). 

And for "independent" bands even in the days where record shops and distribution deals counted for something, the chances of actually seeing your money or getting your unsold stock back in the condition you originally supplied it was negligible. You might as well have given your stock away for free. In the past, I've known bands who lost all their records or CDs when distributors and record shops went bust. These days I wouldn't consider selling any of my band's physical product through a distributor or record shop unless I got the money up front, when it is far more cost effective and just as easy for the audience to buy the product directly from the band.

[Monkey Steve]

20 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

Mr Venom signed The Terrortones up to PledgeMusic when we first considered making an album, and I had a good look at the system to see what the pros and cons would be. I couldn't see any PledgeMusic "community" that would result in our campaign getting noticed or cross-promoted on the site itself.

In the end we decided not to use the service, because we wanted to make the album in our own time when we had the right songs to record and an when we were happy that we had the right versions recorded. Also IMO there is nothing sadder than a band with a PledgeMusic campaign who don't manage to hit even their most basic targets. From experience having punters say they would buy your album after a gig doesn't in any way guarantee a sale when said album becomes available.

The Terrortones album cost about £5k for 7 days recording, overdubbing and mixing, mastering all the tracks including a few extra that didn't make it onto the final release, packaging design and artwork, pressing 500 copies on vinyl, printing the packaging, and also making a promo video for one of the tracks and the first wave of promotion costs. We could have done it for a lot less (probably half the price at the most) if we had gone for CDs instead of vinyl and simplified the packaging, but we decided that the cost wasn't extravagant for a band that was out gigging every week and selling plenty of merch off the back of our gigging, plus divided between the band members it was by no means an unobtainable amount.

As for sales and distribution, IME "independent" bands (who would normally be PledgeMusic's main customers) sell far more product at gigs then they ever do on line. For The Terrortones our total income from on-line sales of physical product, downloads and streaming was less than 10% of our sales of CDs and vinyl at gigs, and nearly all of those came through BandCamp who only take 10% of your sale price (as opposed to the 15% PM take). 

And for "independent" bands even in the days where record shops and distribution deals counted for something, the chances of actually seeing your money or getting your unsold stock back in the condition you originally supplied it was negligible. You might as well have given your stock away for free. In the past, I've known bands who lost all their records or CDs when distributors and record shops went bust. These days I wouldn't consider selling any of my band's physical product through a distributor or record shop unless I got the money up front, when it is far more cost effective and just as easy for the audience to buy the product directly from the band.

if it didn't work for you that's fine, but a few comments:

There is definitely cross promotion - having backed a few PM campaigns I get regular e-mails telling me about projects from bands I've never heard of but who are in similar genre's to the stuff I've backed previously.  the nature of the site is that it's customers are music fans, so it's a good community to spam about bands you may not have heard of.  There is no way I'd have heard of, much less bought an album by a female alt-metal band from Brazil if PM hadn't told me about them.

Agreed, £5k isn't a massive budget for recording an album and pressing 500 copies of it, if you're an established band with that level of income.  But the unknown is whether you will recoup that money by selling all of them.  And the big "what if?" is what if PM could have generated, say, 1000 album sales?  It would remove the uncertainty of how many to press because they would all be sold in advance

As for the 10% vs 15% margin on sales, that's fine for independent bands who aren't hawking their stuff through shops, but that doesn't cover an awful lot of bands who use PM.  From my own order history I've bought stuff by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Killing Joke, Saxon, Gary Numan, Skindred, Therapy? and even Status Quo, stuff that I would normally to go to Amazon or a record shop for, and which turns up on Amazon and in shops once the campaign is over.  It's another tool to maximise income, just like TM stores and Burning Shed.

Like I say, may not work for you, but yours isn't the only band out there and it clearly works for a lot of them...right up to the point when PM stops paying them the money

 

[BigRedX]

On 01/02/2019 at 13:54, Monkey Steve said:

if it didn't work for you that's fine, but a few comments:

There is definitely cross promotion - having backed a few PM campaigns I get regular e-mails telling me about projects from bands I've never heard of but who are in similar genre's to the stuff I've backed previously.  the nature of the site is that it's customers are music fans, so it's a good community to spam about bands you may not have heard of.  There is no way I'd have heard of, much less bought an album by a female alt-metal band from Brazil if PM hadn't told me about them.

Agreed, £5k isn't a massive budget for recording an album and pressing 500 copies of it, if you're an established band with that level of income.  But the unknown is whether you will recoup that money by selling all of them.  And the big "what if?" is what if PM could have generated, say, 1000 album sales?  It would remove the uncertainty of how many to press because they would all be sold in advance

As for the 10% vs 15% margin on sales, that's fine for independent bands who aren't hawking their stuff through shops, but that doesn't cover an awful lot of bands who use PM.  From my own order history I've bought stuff by Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Killing Joke, Saxon, Gary Numan, Skindred, Therapy? and even Status Quo, stuff that I would normally to go to Amazon or a record shop for, and which turns up on Amazon and in shops once the campaign is over.  It's another tool to maximise income, just like TM stores and Burning Shed.

Like I say, may not work for you, but yours isn't the only band out there and it clearly works for a lot of them...right up to the point when PM stops paying them the money

As an artist considering whether or not to use PledgeMusic there was no sign of any sort of "community" or cross promotion of our campaign to existing supporters of similar artists. Maybe that was something that only becomes available when you start your own campaign and for an extra "payment" or percentage of your pledges? I don't know and currently have no way of finding out. Is there anyone on here who has run a successful PM campaign who could comment?

I can't help but think that most of the artists you say you've supported through PledgeMusic really shouldn't be in need of it's services. They all appear to be people who managed to establish a decent sized following under the old "record company" system of artist development and promotion. This is something I see over and over again; bands who are making the "new" ways of producing and promoting their work are those who have already built up a follow or are being supported in the background by management that is already well established. There doesn't seem to be any way for a completely new band of musicians without a "musical history" to benefit, because they need an audience in the first place to make it work.

There are a few artists I like who have previously run PM (or similar) campaigns, but I've always waited until the album has actually been released before buying a copy, if possible directly from the band. Most of the time there is nothing in the pre-release promotion that I want enough to make me want to commit my money that far ahead of the album being released. Also as a punter I have a lot more respect for a band that has managed to get their music out under their own steam, irrespective of whether or not there is an audience for it, and not to have to go begging for money before they will commit themselves to recording and releasing new music.