Sellaband: I’m starting to understand it
Thursday, August 21st, 2008
As some of you will know we had Pim Betist from Sellaband as our guest speaker at our last OpenMusicMedia Meet which turned out to be highly interesting. I don’t think we got very far that night in exploring the ‘1000 True Fans‘ idea which was the topic of the night but I certainly started to understand his crowd sourcing platform for musicians. Those are the things that became obvious after that night:
- the service does not exist to serve long-tail artists, the aim is to get major record deals for their artists
- they are very successful, having already collected $50,000 for 24 artists (each of course) and much more for artists that have not yet reached that threshold
- having a founder who is not from a music background was certainly a plus for Sellaband, you can see Pim’s energy and how he reacted to criticism from people in the room
Pim was also so kind to invite me over to his SellaBration last week in Amsterdam (thanks for that Pim!). There were more lessions to be learned:
- many or the ‘Sellabands’ were actually really good. I especially loved Electric Eel Shock
- after talking to some of those bands you can see how much work they had to put in until they reached the $50,000. One guy was saying that he was spending 3 months sending 10,000s of emails and making 1000s of calls to collect that money
- By filling the Paradiso venue that night they really showed that they managed to build a real community around that site, some of which came from abroad to see their bands playing
My final thoughts: Sellaband has made crowd sourcing for bands work, at least for some bands. Will it replace existing music industry structures? No. Will it has it’s valid place in the music ecosystem? Most certainly yes.
