I have tried to encourage artists to use recorded music rather as a promotional tool than a revenue source. However, it can be a very expensive promotion tool since recording time in a professional studio is expensive. Although modern home recording equipment is affordable and provides good audio quality, you still have to know quite a lot about audio recording, mixing and mastering in order to get good results. If you want to stay unsigned and also get financial support to cover your album’s production costs, try appealing to fans.

Fans are artist’s lifeblood. They are the ones, who will eventually finance your career, one way or another. Normally there are just so many middlemen taking a share of the artist’s revenue that fans end up paying more than they should. I think this is also part of the problem with music piracy. So, forget middlemen and go straight to your fans. Explain them your situation and give them a good incentive to sponsor your new album or single.

Sellaband has a good concept based on appealing to your fans, but the problem with their service is the amount of money that needs to be collected through fans and “investors” before anything is done. $50,000 is a too big challenge for most unsigned bands. So far there are only 10 bands out of 5560, who have been able to gather the required amount. It depends on the band, but I would say that even with $10,000 you could already finance the recording, mixing and mastering of your album in a smaller scale professional studio.

Guidelines to encouraging your fans to sponsor you

• Do background research on how much money does it take exactly to finish your album/single in a professional studio. It’s better to say that you need $9,567 than $10,000, because when you have an exact amount of money as a goal, your fans are more likely to believe that there are no “extra” costs included in the amount. Let your fans know exactly what their money will be used on.
• Many people don’t trust Internet to be a safe way to transfer money, so remember to be professional when you approach your fans. It could be wise to set up a bank account and a PayPal account dedicated only to your band.
• Offer something exclusive to every sponsoring fan. For example an exclusive live concert, a webcam concert in the style of Sandi Thom, a special digipack version of your album, exclusive chat with the band on messenger, etc.
• Let your fans be also investors rather than only donors. Offer them a revenue share from CD sales and digital music sales. If you are planning to give your music away for free and using it mainly as a promotional tool, you can also let your sponsoring fans to get a share of music licensing income.

A band called Ten Year Vamp is a good example of appealing to fans to get album production costs covered. They have decided to give fans a chance to be part of the whole record producing, promotion and selling process by letting them to be the producers of their next studio album. Basically the concept is similar to Sellaband’s, but it’s taken a bit further. The band offers seven different kind of sponsorship packages ranging from $25 to $2000, and there are various exclusive benefits depending on the package. The most expensive package is targeted to corporations, which offers couple of interesting exclusive benefits such as “8 minutes of advertising time on a Ten Year Vamp Video Episode” and “Text Images and Links on our website and mailing lists for your website or business”.

I can say for sure that pulling out this kind of fan sponsoring project takes a lot of time and effort without any guarantee of success. So, if you believe in yourself and you have enough extra money in the bank, don’t bother your fans.