Sellaband has been subject on this blog earlier. The open business model is subject of both of the blog posts. Recently I updated the wiki on Sellaband. I haven’t read much of the average artist experiences so far. Now I am a believer for some time, and supporting my brother STW and his fellow artists that way. Here is the experience of them about Sellaband.
About a year ago, a mutual friend introduced my band The Q4 to Pim Betist, one of the founders of Sellaband. At the time, Sellaband only existed in de minds of Pim and his business partners. We were told that there was a revolutionary concept just to be released, some sort of record label and some big names of major labels had quit their job to be involved with this new concept. Pim and his friends needed us as a band to give some input about the whole process. In return, we would be the first to join and that way we could benefit by getting extra media-attention.
That was all we knew. We had to sign a contract that ensured we would shut up about it until the release, with a penalty of 100.000 dollar, before we would learn more about it. This was of course very exciting to us, so we were in. Then the whole Sellaband concept was explained to us. At first the goal of a Sellaband artist would be to collect 100.000 dollar but we thought that maybe that was too much. Eventually the goal was set to $50.000. We made two tracks to be presented on our Sellaband-site. It was on!
We had no idea what to expect. I guess nobody could really tell what the future would bring. We asked friends to support us and some of them did. We saw the band Nemesia grow really fast. Since Pim and us have this mutual friend, we had some personal contact with Pim. He told us that Nemesea was recruiting a lot of believers via myspace.com, so we put a sellaband banner on our myspace account: www.myspace.com/quadraphoniq and added friends like maniacs
I still don’t know how Nemesea managed to have so many so-called ‘believers’. I guess they’ve got some wealthy friends. The band is also formed on some sort of pop-academy, I think that helps. And of course the fact that they’re a live band. The Q4 is a sample-based band so we don’t have that advantage. We are working on a way to perform live and since we don’t just want to push ‘play’ on stage this will take some time.
At the moment, we have sold 45 parts, so we’ve virtually gathered $450. Until we reach $50.000 we haven’t gathered a penny of course. In time wil will do a guerilla-attack on all our myspace friends, maybe that will give us a boost. But $50.000 is a long way to go.
Still we’ve never had anything to lose by joining Sellaband. Our tracks are played 4000 times and we’ve gathered a lot of friends on myspace. Maybe we expected a bit more benefit of the fact that we were on Sellaband in an early stage but then again, we didn’t know what to expect anyway.
See www.sellaband.com/q4 for their music on Sellaband.
Are there more people who have experience with this open business model? What’s your opinion?