Raising Finance For An Album
Over recent times we have looked at alternative ways of selling your music online. The internet has been an amazing tool for musicians and has leveled the playing field enormously. Once upon a time if you weren’t with a record company you had no hope of ever releasing an album. While the internet has done wonders for the distribution of music there is still the age old problem of how to pay for the recording in the first place. As we all know, recording can be a very expensive business. Sure, the introduction of cheap technology has meant that some people can record quite decent quality tracks in their own home. But at the end of the day, recording is a specialised field and being a good musician doesn’t necessarily mean you are a good recording engineer. So the age-old problem still exists. How do you raise what can be a large amount of money in order to do a professional recording? Once again, the internet has come to our rescue in the form of Slice The Pie.
Slice The Pie is an amazing concept that combines a number of very unique factors into an overall package that seems to work very well. From their website:
What is Slicethepie?
Slicethepie is a place where artists can raise money direct from their fans to professionally record and release an album. We do this by turning every music fan into a record label. The existing industry model is based on a few record labels providing a lot of money to 100’s of artists. Slicethepie enables a model where millions of music fans each provide a little money to 1,000’s of artists.
The basic process works like this:
- You enter your song into what is known as an “Arena”. Here people or “Scouts” will listen to your songs and give you a score out of ten plus a written review. Anyone can be a scout and you are actually paid a small amount for every song reviewed.
- After all of the songs in that particular Arena have been reviewed, the top ten songs move to the next stage - the Showcase.
- The songs that make it into the showcase are then voted upon and the winner is presented with a cheque for £15,000 (about $40,000 Aus) which is then used to fund the recording of an album. Note: this is not an advance and does not have to be paid back as in a normal recording contract.
- A showcase can have more than one “winner” too. In theory any act that makes it into the showcase can qualify for funding if they are able to raise enough support. This is done by selling “back stage passes” for £5.00 each. This back stage pass entitles the purchaser to a copy of the album when it is released. Any act who sells £15,000 worth of back stage passes will receive financing.
- Slice The Pie then releases the album digitally via Tunecore and take a small (20p) amount per album sold for the next two years.
The idea of raising finance by pre-selling the album is brilliant as it takes all of the risk out of the transaction for the artist. Another interesting facet of Slice The Pie is the ability of the punter to purchase contracts in an album which gives them a payout depending on the sales of the album over the two year period. Put simply, anyone can set up their own record label by investing in artists they think will sell well. How cool is that?
The music industry as it was is undergoing massive change due to improved technology and innovative ideas. These changes are proving to be a real boon for those acts that used to struggle to even get a record company to listen to you. It is becoming easier by the day to just bypass the old ways and deal directly with the paying public. Slice the Pie has a lot more to it than I’ve been able to explain here in this short review and you really should check it out for yourself. You won’t be disappointed at all.
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