In the brave new world of today’s music business, there’s plenty of people trying to figure out how to make money, and some current ideas could actually create a new financial windfall for some artists. Now several reports are looking at the potential for fans to invest money in the favorite bands, and it’s an interesting experiment that may or may not work for the greater good.
Music and Crowdfunding Investments
Rolling Stone has reported that we could be in a new golden age where artists may be able to make money from their music. This article mentioned how YouTube has BandPage, “a company that sent a million fans a month directly to artists’ online merch stores,” and Spotify is working on a potential system where artists could be tipped for their music by fans.
Bands have also used Kickstarter, Patreon, and PledgeMusic, where you can invest money to artists to help them and earn rewards in the future like signed merch and meet-and-greet visits.
The problem with PledgeMusic was they went bankrupt after owing bands a lot of money, and apparently, this was a result of “mismanagement of funds that should have been paid through to acts…”
So as Rolling Stone asks the reader if you could invest in a band, would you do it? Would it make a good investment in today’s day and age where many are worried about the economy?
Will This Help Or Hurt?
So now there’s a new company called Corite, which is a music distribution platform but the twist here is bands can “raise money by selling a share of their future streaming royalties to fans…Artists can set both the duration and percentage of the revenue cut a fan (or group of fans) will receive for their investments. Artists hold on to ownership of their copyrights, but are contractually bound to apportion a chunk of their future earnings to supporters.”
In some ways, this is almost structured like a record company where they advanced money to artists to record and tour, but in a way, the investors, meaning you, the fans, are the record company. When money gets made, it goes to the fans, while artists keep the rights to their material.
The fans will also have an incentive to really push their favorite artists because they can potentially make money through them as well. And if fans can study analytics and data, which is very important to today’s music world, they can become smarter investors in their favorite artists, and almost become little music executives in the process.
So the question is, is there real potential for the bands, as well as the fans, to make money? It all remains to be seen, and a lot of this could end up being trial and error to see if it’s actually going to work or not. It could either help revolutionize the business or be an interesting experiment that ultimately didn’t work. Only time will tell.
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