The Roaring Crowdfund

THE ROARING CROWDFUND EPISODE 1: The History of Online Music Crowdfunding

Note: Transcripts of episodes for The Roaring Crowdfund are generated using a combination of a pre-written script (and occasional improvisation) for narration and a transcription service for interviews. Since this material is meant to be listened to, we highly encourage you to experience it that way. If you are quoting any portions of this episode, please check the corresponding audio.

Pat Healy: I spent way more time than I care to admit typing in the following search terms on my work computer: “orgy” “video”  “indie go go” … I swear it was work-related, though! You see, to put together this podcast about online crowdfunding for music, I’ve been combing the internet for all sorts of samples to illustrate just how complicated crowdfunding has become, which leads me to this “orgy” video I was looking up on company time. It was a band called Orgy. You may or may not remember; they had a couple of hits in the late 1990s, one of which was a cover of the New Order song, “Blue Monday.”

So how does it feel … when you look up that band, searching for a video archive of their 2013 crowdfunding campaign, and find nothing? Pretty bad! Especially because I pride myself on being a good googler.

Music Cue: “Stop It” by Dutch ReBelle

Although most pages on crowdfunding sites remain after the campaign has ended, users are able to take down videos, and Orgy likely wanted to remove their video because their 30-day crowdfunding campaign to raise $100,000 earned them … $8,739.

That’s only 9 percent of their flexible goal. Now given that it was a flexible goal, they still got to keep almost $9 grand (which is nothing to scoff at, really) and put it towards their musical project and eventually delivered a seven-song EP to their 217 backers and to the world at large.

But there was one thing that really hurt Orgy’s campaign: They offered rewards that flew in the face of crowdfunding etiquette. Basically, asking a fan to cough up $1,000 for a date with a band member is generally frowned upon as far as the “rewards” for backers go. So journalists online were not kind to them when they fell $92,000 short of their goal, thus Orgy had a reason to want to remove their video.

But as we know, the Internet is a fickle beast. The previous year, in 2012, Amanda Palmer received relentless flak when she exceeded her goal, which was also $100,000.  25,000 backers helped her reach $1.2 million. Her story of how she spent the money is well-documented. Suffice to say, crowdfunding at its worst can be a catch-22:

Damned if you do reach your crowdfunding goal

Damned if you don’t reach your crowdfunding goal

But at its best, crowdfunding can help artists feel empowered, independent, and reach their fans more intimately than ever before ($1,000 date with a band member notwithstanding).

My name is Pat Healy, and this is The Roaring Crowdfund!: a five-part podcast series from Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. We’ll examine four very different musical acts, and follow their progress across various crowdfunding platforms.

And I found some amazing acts that we’ll follow.

A singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter

Unidentified Artist No. 1: Hello

Pat Healy: A hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo

Unidentified Artist No. 2: Hey! Whatup?

Pat Healy: A rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic

Unidentified Artist No. 3: Howdy.

Pat Healy: And a rapper from Boston on Kickstarter

Unidentified Artist No. 4: Yup, yup, yow!

Pat Healy: But before we get to really know our participants, let’s get into the unlikely story of how Internet crowdfunding for musicians began.

Music Cue: “Light & Sound” by Emily Keener

On a photo on Amanda Palmer’s campaign cover page, she holds a sign, a la Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” short, that proclaims “This is the future of music.” Which is a little bit anachronistic, since online crowdfunding for musicians has really been around in some capacity since the late 1990s:

When the progressive British band Marillion announced to their fans that they did not have enough support from their American record label to tour America, the band’s Stateside fans launched a fundraising campaign for Marillion to come to the US.

Mark Kelly is not only Marillion’s keyboardist. He is generally credited with being the guy who invented online crowdfunding for music. He says it all came about because he was lurking on a message board in the late ’90s. Those are his words! Listen!

Mark Kelly: I used to get the daily digest of that mailing list and just read what people were saying. I was a lurker. I didn’t post, I just read it. But then the subject of a Marillion tour of the States came up and eventually I said, ‘Okay, this isn’t gonna happen because we haven’t got a record contract in the States and we always lose money when we go there because we only play small venues.’ One of the American fans suggested that they raise the money. Once they established that we needed $60,000—that was just a figure I plucked out of the air, I knew roughly that we would need somewhere in that region—thinking that none of this was gonna happen, this was just a crazy idea. Then a few weeks later I got contacted by one of the fans who’d opened a bank account and was collecting the money and they had $18,000, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Maybe I should mention this to the rest of the band.

Pat Healy: The members of Marillion were so excited about their success that they wanted to figure out a way to show gratitude to their fans. Thus the seeds were sown for what became a tradition of reward-based crowdfunding.

Mark Kelly: Once we organized the tour, we then thought, ‘well, maybe we should reward the fans that have donated by giving them a free CD and maybe record one of the shows and press up.’ Because by then it was in the hundreds, it wasn’t lots of people. So we figured that would be a nice thing to do. It then became a bit more transactional in the sense that they put money in, if it was at least $10 then that they would get a CD, and actually it was a good investment, because those CDs, I think we made about 800, maybe 1,000, and they were selling on eBay for upwards of a $1,000 each because they were quite rare.

Music Cue: “Only When You’re Breathing” by Johnny Chops & the Razors

Pat Healy: Mark Kelly says he regrets that he didn’t keep one of the CDs for himself. And there were times when the band could have really used an extra $1,000. One of those times was around the year 2000 when the band began to feel like they were on a treadmill; making an album, doing a tour, getting back from tour, and then having to start working on another album right away because sales of the last album weren’t enough to sustain the band for any period of time. It was exhausting!  So when their contract with a record label ended, that’s when Mark turned to the idea of asking the fans, the same fans who came through for Marillion before!

Mark Kelly: They’ve supported us for a tour. ‘Why don’t we ask them to pay for the album in advance, and that money would be like the record company advance?’ And we’d only need to sell maybe, we figured 6,000 or 7,000 would be enough to give us enough money to make the record, and in the end we took advance orders for over 12,000, so it felt like a big success.

Pat Healy: Even though Marillion’s fans had given them one lump sum of money before via the web, keep in mind that this was the first time a band ever put it on the line with their fans and said, “if you give us money, we’ll make you an album.” It’s commonplace now, but think of the risks involved of being the first musicians to do this! So were the band members nervous about it?

Mark Kelly: Absolutely, yeah. Again, it was a completely untested idea, and there was a lot of reservations about it. People would say, ‘Well, you know, what if the fans come to us and say, ‘oh we want to tell you what sort of album to make,’ or what if something happens and we can’t complete the recording, we’ve got all their money?’ I mean there was a lot of unknowns really. Also practical things like taking payments from people for something that you haven’t actually given them. Credit card companies were a bit strange about that as well, so at one point we had some of our funds frozen while they decided what to do about it. Of course, which could have been a complete disaster, because we needed the money in order to live to make the album, you know?

Pat Healy: So Marillion made the money to fund the album, and crowdfunding music online was officially born!

Music Cue: “Holdin” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: Since then, crowdfunding has evolved, first from a tentative practice, then to a sensation, and gradually into an institution. Platforms emerged—Artistshare was the first—platforms dissolved—we miss you Sellaband, Feed the Muse, etc.—and here we are in 2018. Like crowdfunding itself, only the strong survive.

After speaking to crowdfunding platform founders, music supervisors, and some of the artists who use these platforms throughout our five episodes, one thing is clear: The first question to ask when contemplating launching a crowdfunding campaign: Do you have an actual “crowd”?

You need one, because the crowdfunding market is very crowded. In addition to all of the young upstarts and hobbyists dreaming of quitting their day jobs are acts who had hits a while ago, looking to avoid ever having to get a day job …

Sound Cue: [Audio samples of crowdfunding greeting videos from Hoobastank, Art Alexakis, Rick Springfield, and Queensrÿche]

Pat Healy: And even classic bands like U2 and Radiohead, they’ve used the platforms to give their fans a chance to pre-order a product.

So all of those bands that I played soundbites from, and the ones that I just mentioned—U2 and Radiohead— they are running (or ran) their crowdfunding campaigns on PledgeMusic. Now let’s get into the controversial who did what when of online music crowdfunding and the difference between crowdfunding platforms.

Music Cue: “Recline” by Dutch ReBelle

So like I said before, ArtistShare was the first music crowdfunding site to establish an online presence. Beginning in 2001, Brian Camelio started ArtistShare as a platform to help fund releases by musicians whom he had signed, so the relationship functioned like a label, but a label where the financing comes from fans of the artist instead of the label itself. The platform was basically a blueprint for the way that crowdfunding sites like Pledge and Kickstarter function, but Camelio said he doesn’t really even like the term “crowdfunding.” In fact, “crowdfunding” wasn’t even being thrown around as a way to describe this until about 2006. Here’s Camelio:

Brian Camelio: I truly believe that our model is different than crowdfunding. I personally don’t like the word ‘crowdfunding.’ What we did, we built what I believe ArtistShare to be is a relationship-based marketing platform that has a crowdfunding element to it. The transactional nature of crowdfunding, which is basically, ‘We need to raise some money. Let’s ask the people for money. Let’s set a goal and focus almost exclusively on that one thing.’ It’s a transactional type of model, which was kind of … extracted from ArtistShare and then put into these other sites.

Pat Healy: Camelio, who had filed a patent for ArtistShare’s model, approached the burgeoning Kickstarter about licensing its patent from ArtistShare in 2009. Then, in 2011, Kickstarter sued ArtistShare for declaratory relief that Kickstarter was NOT infringing upon Camelio’s “Method and Apparatuses for Financing and Marketing a Creative Work” patent.

Brian Camelio: “Well, it’s funny. I actually … in a lot of ways, don’t equate ArtistShare with those other companies. I always want to reach out to them and talk to them. That’s one of the reasons why Kickstarter and I got into a legal tussle, is because I had reached out to them to see if there was any way we could partner. I received a patent. I applied for a patent in 2002, and I received it. Things just got strange, and they offered to buy it. Then they sued us, and it was all unnecessary.”

Music Cue: “Soapbox” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: So Kickstarter won the suit in 2015, with US District Judge Katherine Failla ruling that “the claims are squarely about creating a contractual relationship—a `transaction performance guaranty’—that is beyond question of ancient lineage.”

Basically, she’s saying, people who appreciate the arts have funded artists for a long time—a tradition “of ancient lineage,” if you will—so that can’t be patented. Judge Failla ruled that everything else about ArtistShare’s patent described “either conventional computer activities or routine data-gathering steps.”

Meanwhile, other crowdfunding ventures had begun popping up around the world. Sellaband had begun in Amsterdam in 2006 with a similar label-like model as ArtistShare. But all acts had to reach $50,000 before Sellaband would help them find a studio and big-name producer to make their album.

The company has since gone bankrupt.

As for IndieGogo, Danae Ringelmann founded that company after she produced a play but couldn’t get funding to take it to the next level. IndieGoGo officially launched at the Sundance Film Festival in the beginning of 2008, with a  focus on funding film projects. The company launched with a very “filmmaker”-specific “who we are” page that said,

Andrea Taylor: IndieGoGo is an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. The platform provides filmmakers the tools for project funding, recruiting, and promotion, while enabling the audience to discover and connect directly with filmmakers and the causes they support.”

Pat Healy: “Filmmakers, Filmmakers, Filmmakers,” amirite? IndieGoGo eventually diversified in mid 2009, updating the “about” portion of its site to say,

Andrea Taylor: “If you’re a filmmaker, musician, video game programmer, writer, or creative production company trying to get a project started, finished, marketed or distributed, or if you’re a fan eager for more personally relevant and interesting media, IndieGoGo is where both can take action and influence what projects are brought to life.”

Pat Healy: Both of those snippets of audio were text from early incarnations of IndieGoGo’s website, read aloud by a voice actress to break up the programming a little bit. You’ll hear from her occasionally throughout our five episodes.

Thanks, Andrea.

Andrea Taylor: No problem, Pat.

Pat Healy: Okay, so when Kickstarter came on the scene in 2009, it quickly became the industry leader in crowdfunding. Although music was always a part of the equation, it was never the sole focus. The slogan on its homepage upon launching read,

Andrea Taylor: “Kickstarter is a funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, bloggers, explorers.”

Pat Healy: The first project Kickstarter launched featured artist Perry Chen—incidentally one of Kickstarter’s creators—hoping to raise $1,000 in 30 days to create a run of T-shirts saying, “Grace Jones Does Not Give a Fuck,” with the image of the singer spray-painted on the front. He wasn’t successful. But the platform was. The site crossed 1 million backers in 2011, which is the year that Brian Camelio approached them.

Music Cue: “Coming Home Easy” by Johnny Chops

Jayce Varden and Benji Rogers are both currently instructors for Berklee Online. They teach Online Music Marketing and Music Business Trends and Strategies, respectively. But long before that, they founded PledgeMusic in 2009, about four months after Kickstarter began. Pledge is different because it was the first music-only open platform for crowdfunding as we know it. What Pledge brought to the game was the idea of a campaign as a pre-order, which eventually helped court established artists to launch campaigns.

Here’s Jayce Varden:

Jayce Varden: There was no platform that was solely focused on music run by guys who had been in bands and had a proclivity for wanting the best experience possible for the artist to provide the fans with to create that value proposition. So, we figured that an artist’s ability to create an experience and deliver a story and tell a narrative to make people involved in the creative process of music was a great way to revalue, maybe, just the music. Which was feeling like it was really devalued at the time.

Pat Healy: Think about where the music business was in 2009. It was almost a decade after the file-sharing free-for-all that Napster started, and the industry had never quite stabilized. Spotify was just launching in the UK, and any chance for professional musicians to have a dependable business model was looking bleak.

Bruce Houghton has many different perspectives on the music industry. He edits and publishes an online blog called hypebot.com, he teaches Music Marketing and Music Business Trends and Strategies for Berklee Online, and he owns a booking agency called Skyline Artists, which books contemporary acts like Zoe Keating along with legacy acts like Roger McGuinn, Pure Prairie League, and A Flock of Seagulls.

He says that when PledgeMusic began partnering with the types of experienced artists that he works with, it was a real boon for first-week sales of their new releases, since those artists’ fans might otherwise wait a little while to buy their newest offerings. That meant…suddenly, these acts could get on the charts again!

Bruce Houghton: The major labels use PledgeMusic and other services as advance sales sites, so in essence they’re saying to the fan, “Give us the money even before the product is out.” It helps them gauge interest, it helps them raise money, and it also helps them get advance sales, so that on the day that the new Def Leppard box set goes on sale, if it’s sold 10,000 copies in advance, then bam! those 10,000 copies show up on Nielsen SoundScan and it looks like they had a great first week. So the labels use these tools and are probably going to continue to.

Music Cue: “Tombstone Flowers” by Johnny Chops & the Razors

Pat Healy: Okay, so continuing on with our timeline, GoFundMe began in 2010, and although the site catered towards more personal fundraising like medical bills, honeymoons, funerals, etc., musicians eventually set up camp on this platform too.

Then Patreon came on the scene in 2013. Musician Jack Conte was one of the founders, and you may know his face from YouTube. He’s in a duo called Pomplamoose who generated some serious YouTube buzz as the viral video age hit its stride.

He and bandmate/life partner Nataly Dawn were known for making videos where they’d perform all instruments and showcase themselves doing so in neatly edited footage. They made some money soundtracking car commercials, but weren’t able to sustain a living from that alone. On YouTube they had millions of views and subscribers that numbered in the hundreds of thousands and figured there had to be a way to monetize.

So Conte and his friend Samuel Yam, launched Patreon as a way for patrons of artists to pay their favorite artists on a continuous basis. Like a monthly subscription. Or as they said upon launch …

Patreon Video: “Patreon lets fans become patrons of their favorite artists and content creators. It’s different than Kickstarter, because it’s not about one big project that requires lots of funding.

Pat Healy: This, by the way, is actually from a video from Patreon’s launch. Not a voice actor that I hired. Anyway …

Patreon Video: Here’s how it works: When you become a patron, you’re agreeing to give an artist a tip of an amount you set, every time they release a piece of content, whether it’s a new song, a video, or a recipe. You can set a monthly maximum, to make sure that you’re always within your budget. Choose an amount, enter your payment information, and you’re done!

Pat Healy: These days each of the major diversified crowdfunding platforms has a music manager. Allow me to introduce you to one …

Molly Neuman: I’m Molly Neuman. I’m the head of music at Kickstarter.

Pat Healy: Molly’s got an interesting story, riding the wave of possibilities for what a career in the ever-changing music industry is over the past 25 years. In fact, in the time since we recorded our interview, she has taken a job as head of business development at SongTrust, the world’s largest global royalty collection service and publishing administrator. She began her career in music as the drummer for Bratmobile.

Molly Neuman: We were part of the riot grrrl movement, although I don’t think that we ever looked at ourselves and said, ‘We’re the riot grrrl movement!’ in exactly that way … through our band we got a lot of attention and we were really self-propelled and self-managed. We didn’t have a lot of business people or advisors in our universe. We had to figure it out as we went along. That was intense, and also kind of not sustainable.

Pat Healy: Shortly after Bratmobile broke up in 1994, Molly took a job with Lookout! Records, which was about to get huge, thanks to a little band called Green Day, who released their first recordings on the label and were now blowing up to be one of the biggest bands on the planet, with their major label jump to Warner Brothers.

Molly Neuman: My role, when I started, was to work on helping the bands that weren’t Green Day—so the bands that were actively signed at the time—and help them get some attention and visibility, because Lookout! up to that point had been pretty hands-off on any promo and PR, and things like that. I started doing management of some of the artists as well, which was wonderful.

Pat Healy: She worked with the Donnas, who ended up signing to Atlantic.

Molly Neuman: That just gave me a different perspective into the industry. Working with major record companies, international launch plans, a global approach to marketing an artist. It was fascinating. I learned a tremendous amount.

Pat Healy: She also was working with Ted Leo, who for those of you who might not know is pretty much indie rock royalty. He was on Lookout! for a long time, and released music on almost every formidable indie label: Ace Fu, Gern Blandsten, Touch and Go, Matador. But Molly—who I’m basically using as a personification of the music industry’s winding path over the past decade—she saw that the landscape was shifting and took a job at eMusic.

Molly Neuman: That was a good time to be in digital music. I mean, obviously the physical business was quickly shifting from CDs to digital … that blend of experience is what got me to Kickstarter today. It’s wonderful to be able to offer that perspective when I’m talking to artists now and how I think Kickstarter can be an option and why it’s a good one for artists, especially beginning their careers, to have a sense of the work ethic that’s required. I think Kickstarter campaigns require it almost.

Music Cue: “The Things I Do” by Emily Keener

Pat Healy: Talking to artists—both established and new—has become a large component of some of the major crowdfunding platforms. As for established artists, well, we’ve already talked about Radiohead and U2 doing Pledge campaigns and Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter, but it wasn’t always this way. According to Neuman, getting her friend and former client Ted Leo on board with Kickstarter wasn’t a given.

Molly Neuman: I know like five years ago, when Kickstarter was still in its early days, he was like, ‘Fuck that. You know, I’m never gonna be begging,’ blah, blah, blah.’

Pat Healy: And here’s Ted Leo:

Ted Leo: Well, I think that if I ever said that … I’m sure I may have had the word ‘fuck’ in there but I am sure I articulated it a little differently, frankly I did feel that way at a certain point in time. I think a lot people in my position did. We had started to—people like me, I say we—had built a career under the old model, but in a way that always felt very generous and not necessarily profit-driven. I was like walking a tightrope between making it work and having it all fall apart every day of my life and then when people stopped buying music … which continues … as much as if felt like an earthquake 10, 12 years ago, it’s still almost an even harder problem to deal with now. So initially when crowdfunding came around, it just felt like a weird cul-de-sac. It felt like not a solution to anything. Initially it felt like begging. It felt like being asked to busk for people who are ostensibly already your fans. Crowdfunding is still really, at least in the music world very rarely about appealing to a new audience or growing your audience. It’s about engaging your base, engaging your core, and in a lot of ways it seems to prioritize or enable treating it more like the realm of hobbyists as opposed to it being something that could work for artists who had spent their lives building something. And it felt … Initially I think it felt kind of demeaning, honestly. I’ve been putting all of this work and money and time in on the front end to make these things and ostensibly people who are going to support this campaign are probably already my fans. Why can’t we just keep doing things the way that we’ve been doing? Why do I have to all of a sudden appeal to you on the front end of this because the business model isn’t working anymore, because nobody’s buying records?”

Pat Healy: But Ted Leo changed his tune once he had raised more money than he had ever received as an advance from a label.

Ted Leo: There’s no way in hell that my last label, Matador, would have let me make a double-album gatefold. It just wouldn’t happen, you know?

Music Cue: “Believer” by Johnny Chops & the Razors

Pat Healy: In 2018 it’s easier for a musician who was formerly on a label (or many different labels) to turn to their fans for a big project. But it’s a lot harder in 2018 for a musician who has never been on a label.

This is exactly the great adventure we’ll undertake in the next four episodes with the artists we profile. John Trigonis, who is a campaign strategist for film and music at Indiegogo explains why it’s so hard for artists who haven’t yet reached that level.

John Trigonis: We hit the plateau, and now we’re kind of like, crowdfunding is ubiquitous with any kind of creative project funding, and even technology products, that you can imagine. It’s a main part of it, but because of oversaturation now, that’s what’s made it dwindle a bit in the sense of random strangers looking around like they were in 2010, 2011, and 2012, trying to find cool shit to fund. It’s just … you have to now stand out. You have to put marketing dollars to it. Those are the campaigns that are raising $100,000 + at this point. And crowdfunding is still doing really well for anybody who wants to raise a few thousand dollars to about $50,000. You can do it, but you’re going to have to work much harder and be more creative. And at the bottom line, the reason it’s … there are three big reasons, right? I’ll just break them down into three. One, that it’s kind of plateaued. Number one is the oversaturation, as I mentioned. Number two is the fact that, straight up, people are lazy. People have gotten lazy. They don’t want to compete with 50, or 100, or 150 other projects now that are very similar to theirs, when back in the day, there was only about two other ones, three other ones, tops. And there were less platforms. And then the third reason, I would say is just it’s harder to stand out because the backers are getting much more savvy. And that’s something that no crowdfunder has ever thought was going to happen. Crowdfunding was invented to keep out, or basically, push aside the gatekeepers that tell you that your project is not good enough for my big money. So it opened it up to the crowd. But now the crowd has become so savvy that they have now become the gatekeepers. And they’re saying, “Your project isn’t worth my small dollars.” People just aren’t educating themselves about crowdfunding and where it stands today. They’re just launching because they see that, ‘Hey, this person can raise $200k, so can I.’ Do a little research. You’re going to find out why they were able to raise $200,000.

After looking extensively for a diverse group of artists to profile, what Trigonis says about oversaturation makes a lot of sense. Looking through Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, and PledgeMusic, it’s tough to navigate through the noise. Like any interest represented online, you’re going to find a lot of stuff that is very niche. It’s kind of like “Rule 34,” but for music. “If it can be imagined, it exists.” For instance, “a concept album about wild horses.”

Unidentified Concept Album About Wild Horses: Like the magic and the majesty of America’s wild horses that informed the creation of this collaboration, our music is a potent combination of beauty and tenderness, and power.

Pat Healy: This project was fully funded by the way! $17 grand!

Unidentified Concept Album About Wild Horses: The music that we were able to create together, was initially inspired by my passion for horses

Pat Healy: Checking out these platforms is a lot like going to a record store where there’s almost no categorization. But I do believe I have indeed found amazing artists, and I’m very thankful for the time they allowed me to spend, pestering them each week, asking questions  that ranged from, “Were you expecting this past week to be so successful?” to “You really didn’t raise much money this week; what are you gonna do?”

Music Cue: “Meant for Me” by Dutch ReBelle

So you remember when we introduced our participants at the beginning of the show?

We found a singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter

Emily Keener: Hello … I’m Emily Keener

Pat Healy: A hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo

Stono Echo: Hey, this is Paten Locke, and Jay Myztroh … and we are Stono Echo

Pat Healy: A rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic

Johnny Chops: Howdy … I’m Johnny Chops

Pat Healy: And a rapper from Boston on Kickstarter

Dutch ReBelle: Yup, yup, yow … I’m Dutch ReBelle.

Pat Healy: You’ll get to know all of these artists a lot more in Episode 2 of The Roaring Crowdfund, but you’re actually familiar with their music already! You’ve been listening to them throughout this episode, as they provided all of the background music. Kind of like that Palmolive commercial from the 1980s: “You’re soaking in it!” Anyway, this is a song by Dutch ReBelle you’re hearing in the background now. I encourage you to look these artists up to check out their music, but their crowdfunding campaigns are all over, so I advise you not to peek at those pages until after you’ve listened to this whole series. You can also check out the Roaring Crowdfund playlist on Spotify.

For additional assets like photos, videos, and a crowdfunding readiness kit, visit online.berklee.edu. You’ll also find links to the specific tracks used in this episode. Join us next week to hear more of The Roaring Crowdfund.

The Roaring Crowdfund was made possible by Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. Today’s podcast was written and produced by me Pat Healy, edited, mixed, and mastered  by Joel Thibodeau at Spake. Special thanks to Andrew Walls, Gabriel Ryfer Cohen, Cristina Daura, who designed the graphics, Tim Scholl and Steve Zimmerman, who made the website look so good, and voice actor Andrea Taylor.

THE ROARING CROWDFUND EPISODE 2: Tell Your Story Online, Sell Your Music Online

Note: Transcripts of episodes for The Roaring Crowdfund are generated using a combination of a pre-written script (and occasional improvisation) for narration and a transcription service for interviews. Since this material is meant to be listened to, we highly encourage you to experience it that way. If you are quoting any portions of this episode, please check the corresponding audio.

Music Cue: “Young OG” by Dutch ReBelle

Pat Healy: A woman sits by a lake, wearing a polka-dot dress, holding a guitar. She wants something. A man sits at a recording console, wearing a faded Stevie Wonder T-shirt, patting one of two basset hounds next to him. One of the dogs’ ears droops onto the man’s perfectly worn-in jeans. He wants something too.

To be clear, I’m talking about the man wanting something, not the basset hound. I mean, the dog probably wants something too, but it’s different from what the man wants. The dog probably just wants food.

Back to that man, and the woman beside the lake. They both want something!

They both want your money — so they can make music!

These are two of the four musicians I’m profiling in this podcast, and the scenes I was describing were from the intro videos of their crowdfunding campaigns. You’ll hear about all four artists in this episode. We’ll get into how much they want, how fast they want it, and what they want to do with your money!

Music Cue: “Holdin” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: My name is Pat Healy, and this is The Roaring Crowdfund!: a five-part podcast series from Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. We’ll examine four very different musical acts, and follow their progress across various crowdfunding platforms. Will these musicians get what they want…what they need?

And I found some amazing acts that we’ll follow:

A singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter

Emily Keener: Hello. I’m Emily Keener

Pat Healy: A hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo

Stono Echo: Hey, this is Paten Locke, and this is Jay Myztroh, and we are Stono Echo!

Pat Healy: A rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic

Johnny Chops: Howdy. I’m Johnny Chops.

Pat Healy: And a rapper from Boston on Kickstarter

Dutch ReBelle: Yup, yup, yow. I’m Dutch ReBelle.

Pat Healy: The intro video is the first thing most people engage with in a music crowdfunding campaign. If you’re an artist, it’s the primary means of sharing your story, and telling the world who you are.  It’s where the artists put themselves out there. It’s shared on social media, it’s an artist’s calling card to people who’ve never seen, heard or heard OF you — so to make that video kick ass is of the utmost importance. But an effectively kickass video varies from genre to genre, and platform to platform.

Jayce Varden is the co-founder of PledgeMusic, one of the biggest crowdfunding sites, and he knows that the intro video can make or break a campaign. He also knows that making one is especially tough for older acts who are new to crowdfunding.

Jayce Varden: I think one of the most daunting things for artists who have been established that I’ve found was the creation of that intro video. That’s really where a lot of the hang-up and a lot of the launch pushbacks happen because they’re not happy with the way that video comes out.

Pat Healy: But for musicians who are still making their careers, it’s not quite as terrifying.

Emily Keener is the Cleveland, Ohio-based woman I mentioned in the intro, sitting on the banks of Lake Erie. On Kickstarter, she’s waging a 30-day campaign to raise $9,999 to make her upcoming record on vinyl. Her campaign video is shot with one camera, one angle, and has minimal edits. Fair to say: aggressively DIY. You can hear the water lapping at the rocks. The breeze coming off the lake hits the mic and occasionally overpowers her words. Listen:

Emily Keener: My name is Emily Keener, and I’m releasing my fourth studio album in 2018. Last year, I was a contestant on The Voice and I advanced all the way to the top 12 before coming home to release my latest record, Breakfast.

Pat Healy: Hold up. Did she just say that she was on The Voice?

Emily Keener: Last year, I was a contestant on The Voice

Pat Healy: Yup, The Voice. And she was 16! Or as Blake Shelton said …

Blake Shelton: She’s a baby!

Pat Healy: Emily’s 18 now, and, as she tells you in her video, she’s grown up quite a bit since The Voice …

Emily Keener Pledge Video: The past year of my life has been extremely exciting and tumultuous, and I’ve written so many new songs that I’m ready to bring into the world with your help.

Pat Healy: Then she gets into it … what she wants. She hopes to release her next album as an actual 12-inch record, through a partnership between Kickstarter and the vinyl manufacturer Qrates.  

Emily Keener Pledge Video: So for the first time ever, my music will be available on vinyl. Yay!

Pat Healy: But she can only do it with your help. With your money. And this video is her best shot. After about a minute-and-a-half of persuasive commentary, Emily stops talking.

Emily Keener Pledge Video: I’ll shut up now. I’ll give you a little piece of music; this is a bit of one of my newest songs. [singing] “I’ll start building a boat, late into every night, to sail us both away from the passing time, oh the waves, constellations, oh the moonlight on our faces, the kind of place where no one ever leaves … ”

Pat Healy: The about-face that happens in this video is mesmerizing. That “little piece of music” shatters any criticism of a half-assed video that doesn’t completely tell her story. It’s also immediately clear why she did so well on The Voice. Her voice can literally lift your heart. But don’t take my word. Take Blake Shelton’s …

Blake Shelton: Your voice, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard before. It’s just a completely new sound.”

Pat Healy: Or Pharrell Williams’ …

Pharrell Williams: What I loved is that you just used the entire tapestry of your vocal cords.

Pat Healy: Or Christina Aguilera’s …  

Christina Aguilera:  There’s something so beautifully controlled, and true, and honest.

Pat Healy: Or even take Adam Levine’s word for it.

Adam Levine: I immediately zeroed in on what you were doing, how you were doing it, and was just drawn magnetically to it.

Pat Healy: All four of those judges spun their seats around for her, by the way. So will enough people be “drawn magnetically” to Emily Keener’s campaign? Based on her first day, it seems pretty promising. Emily, at the end of day one of her campaign, is at about $2,700; 27 percent of her $9,999 goal.

Emily Keener: I’m feeling pretty great about it. We got off to a really strong start. People were really excited to hear about the new record that I was making so I think that inspired a lot of action, which is awesome! My new record is a little ways off, so I figured. ‘I’ll wait until we’ve got everything recorded and done and then we’ll take a look at our options.’ But actually, Kickstarter approached me and let me know about their Let’s Make Vinyl initiative … They found my music on YouTube, somewhere in the depths of the Internet. Of all that music out there, they’d just figure they’d reach out to me and asked me to be part of the first batch of artists to do the Let’s Make Vinyl thing. So, I just kind of quickly put together a project. It took me a couple of weeks, but I got it done. So, it kind of fell in my lap but, I really enjoy the way that Kickstarter has been working out and it seems to be a useful and relatively user-friendly platform, so that’s been pretty great.

Pat Healy: One of the reasons Kickstarter likely reached out was because of Emily Keener’s following, which grew exponentially during her stint on The Voice. New followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter led to a bigger list of email contacts.

Emily Keener: I think, I probably gained around 10,000 followers on each platform on average. So that was a pretty amazing little step up there. And it’s definitely helped as I go about my career as far as like, getting people out to shows and touring to new cities, that’s been awesome. So, just shares on social media alone do so much. And really, through Facebook and an email list, that’s where I’ve gotten more than 70 percent of my donations …

Pat Healy: Emily has an email list of about 800, which is a much more direct connection than any social media platform, but she finds more success when she gets even more direct than email.

Emily Keener: One of the most important things I’ve found is to bring it up in face-to-face conversation at my shows. Ya know, word-of-mouth is really important. And especially when you’ve just shown off what your craft is and you’ve been up onstage in front of a bunch of people, to have a conversation with them about what’s coming up next, it’s really effective because they’re receptive and they’re ready to help you out with whatever you’re doing

Pat Healy: So, what about Emily’s STORY? She said in her intro video that her past year was  “extremely exciting and tumultuous,”

Emily Keener Pledge Video: extremely exciting and tumultuous …

Pat Healy: But those details are NOT in her three-minute intro video. I asked her about that.

Emily Keener: I think that year  had a lot of really difficult aspects to it, emotionally, and relationally, I think that I was transitioning from teenhood to adulthood in a way that most people don’t. I mean, it was kind of like an overwhelming thing. My experience of being on The Voice was such a huge culture shock for me. I was used to kind of, you know, handling a lot, and I had been working as a musician for probably five or six years by that point, and I had this sort of a sense that I knew the ropes about things, but as soon as my audition process for The Voice started, it was kind of like this sense of feeling like so small and unprepared for how crazy that experience ended up being. It felt like a continual test of my ability to just, like, handle things. So, I think that was like a turning point for me, where I learned so much in a short period of time, which was great, but it was also kind of like, it was hard for me to relate to people in a normal way when I got back home. I don’t wanna be dramatic and be like “everybody treated me differently,” but it was that, in kind of a sense. It was like I’d spent so much time away from home and kind of like not being able to tell people about what was going on in my life, because of confidentiality things that it was hard for me to like make the transition from not telling people anything to communicating normally with friends and family when I got back. And I think that all I knew how to do with that intensity was to convert it into music, and try and make sense of it that way. I think that I was just feeling a little bit like isolated because I didn’t know how to handle it. I mean, I was 16 when I auditioned for the show. I think it was A LOT for a home-schooled kid to process. It was just a lot of stimulus, so I think that in part had a lot to do with the transition from one level of maturity to another. Yeah, it made for a confusing year!

Pat Healy: By the way, I told Emily that I would describe her video as “aggressively DIY” and “half-assed” in this podcast, and she was cool with it.

Emily Keener: It was a bit of a procrastination thing, like, we were supposed to have that video up within the week or maybe even in a couple days, so it was kinda like, ‘yeah, we should probably do that now,’ like have a video for this Kickstarter, like the most important thing. I don’t know. There wasn’t even an attempt to get like good recording equipment or anything, it was just kinda like turning the camera on and playing songs, so there was tons of wind noise, because we were right on the lake, and it was just kinda like totally, yes, it was “aggressively DIY.”

Pat Healy: But not everybody who runs a crowdfunding campaign is able to get exposure from a televised competition like The Voice. And not everybody trying to raise money for an album is touring for themselves. Meet Johnny Chops.

Johnny Chops: Howdy, I’m Johnny Chops.

Pat Healy: Johnny is the frontman of Johnny Chops & the Razors, based in Austin, Texas. That’s his tune “Tombstone Flowers” looping in the background right now. Actually, you’ll probably wanna hear a little bit of that too!

Music Cue: “Tombstone Flowers” by Johnny Chops

Pat Healy: He’s hoping to raise $5,000 in 60 days on PledgeMusic to make his upcoming release on vinyl and CD. He’s using PledgeMusic to make his second album on vinyl and CD. He’s the guy sitting  front of the recording console in his intro video, petting the two basset hounds. Remember him?

Johnny’s main gig is as the bassist for a group called the Randy Rogers Band. If you haven’t heard of them, the Randy Rogers Band are a big deal. They’ve played more than 2,000 shows since 2002. On Spotify you’ll see their top songs have millions of streams. Their biggest hit, “Kiss Me in the Dark” has more than 12 million.

ED NOTE: Streaming numbers have changed since the recording of this podcast.

Let’s put that in context. What’s 12 million streams on Spotify mean?  

Andrea Taylor: As a frame of reference, that’s the same amount of streams as Wilco’s “California Stars,” about 5.2 million streams more than Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” and about 3 million streams more than the top 10 Flying Burrito Brothers songs on Spotify put together.

Pat Healy: Thanks.

Andrea Taylor: No problem, Pat.

Pat Healy: The Randy Rogers Band’s music sounds like a mix of those tunes, and is right up there with other hard-hitters on the rootsier side of contemporary country. The music that Johnny Chops and the Razors make sounds a little bluesier, but the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree that he’s been carving his initials on for the past 16 years.

Music Cue: “Gimme Sugar” by Johnny Chops & the Razors

Pat Healy: So, what’s Johnny’s story in his intro video? What does he want and why? His video begins with a Rhodes piano and a blurry image of Johnny Chops and the Razors in the studio, coming into focus as a song begins to make its presence known. The scene looks professional —  shots of tattooed arms click drumsticks and prep to kick into high gear on electric guitar and stand-up bass. Then the video transitions to Johnny talking to the camera, with his basset hounds, who, it turns out, are more than just props.

Johnny Chops Pledge Video: A portion of all funds raised will go the Rockport Humane Society, a volunteer-run, no-kill animal shelter. When you pledge your Access Pass, you’ll receive an immediate download of one of our favorite tracks, ‘Taking a Chance on Me,’ and you’ll be helping the Texas Gulf Coast recover from Hurricane Harvey.

Pat Healy: He’s contributing a portion of his proceeds to causes that are close to home, literally. Though Johnny and his dogs are sitting in a professional studio, the audio and video quality are not as professional as the video’s opening scene. He gives one last brief heartfelt message …

Johnny Chops Pledge Video: Because Every song deserves a community. And what better place to grow one than Pledge Music? Thanks so much and keep on rocking.

Pat Healy: And then Johnny is out! We hear more of his song, “Gimme Sugar,” and we see more of that professional-quality footage that opened the video. The 97-second video ends with a floor shot of the basset hounds walking towards the camera. When Johnny and I first speak, he’s a few days into his campaign and at $550, 11 percent of his goal. I ask how much advance planning he ended up putting into his campaign, and this is how he answers.

Johnny Chops: I’m pretty sure that my dogs and my wife are ready for me to get off the computer. Does that count? Does that give you any kind of indication? Yeah I’ve spent a lot of time working on it.

Pat Healy: It turns out Johnny’s dogs were also a major factor in him choosing PledgeMusic over any other music crowdfunding platform.

Johnny Chops: I like how they incorporate a little bit of the charity aspect. I think when you’re raising money, I mean not only does it look better that you’re looking for a charity as well, it’s just nice, it’s about sharing. And I think that spoke to me …

Pat Healy: It’s important to note about Johnny is a full-time musician.

Johnny Chops: I think the commitment helps, if you can do it, if you can find a way to make it happen. I think it becomes a lot more real and a lot more immediate in your life when it’s your means of supporting yourself.

Pat Healy: As I said, Johnny is running a 60-day campaign, and the rest of the artists we’re profiling here are running 30-day campaigns. So he’s got time. Let’s check back in with Johnny again a little later.

Music Cue: “Workin’” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: This is Stono Echo. They’re are a hip-hop duo based in Jacksonville, Florida. They have 30 days to raise $4,000 on Indiegogo to make their latest album on vinyl and CD. But unlike the other acts in the Roaring Crowdfund, their campaign features a flexible goal, which means if they don’t make the $4,000 they’re asking for, they still get to keep whatever they make. Stono Echo’s intro video begins with the two principal members—Jay Myztroh and Paten Locke—holding their debut record. The production value is, well, there’s a lot of white noise in the background, and their conversation feels genuine and unrehearsed. Myztroh carefully hands the record to Paten Locke, who makes this commentary.

Stono Echo Pledge Video: Feels nice. It’s got a nice weight, as a record dude, it’s got a nice weight but it’s not too weighty, I like that. Not sure which is the … there’s the A side … I’m gonna start right on the A side.

Pat Healy: After a bit of candid conversation, we’re into the real intro. Paten Locke and Jay Myztroh lean up against a wall of some of Paten’s choice vinyl. There’s prime selections of dub, jazz, gospel, and reggae.

Andrea Taylor: Check out the playlist on this episode’s webpage for a deeper dive into the music that shaped Stono Echo.

Pat Healy: Oh, thanks again.

Andrea Taylor: No problem, Pat.

Pat Healy: Anyway, Paten is on the left, wearing a Stono Echo T-shirt, and a backwards baseball hat, while Myztroh wears a Stono Echo hoodie and a knit tam for his dreads. Their sound bites are in quick cuts, as they tell their story and try to sell their music.

Stono Echo Pledge Video: And we’re here today to let you know that we have a record that is coming out soon and today starts your chance to be able to pre-order it, to make sure you have it the second it drops. The name of the record is Black Diamonds.

[sings] Black Diamonds!

Our debut, being pressed to vinyl. Yes!

[sings] Black vinyl!

Soul hip-hop? Yeah, hip-hop soul, soul hip-hop, but it’s also gospel and jazz. Got my man Jay Myztroh handling all the vocals, P. Locke on the production, we put that together and we’ll get you all off with the Stono Echo sound, the thrill of our music.

Our hearts and souls are in this project and we stand by it. It speaks to the now and it speaks to what’s going on in the world. Now, we’re launching this campaign here to actually give you the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.”

Pat Healy: Their narrative is part introduction, part sales pitch. But as with the other intro videos, the music itself is a better testament to why it’s worthwhile to pledge money to their cause. A week into their campaign, their fans have pledged $500, about 13 percent of their goal. Here are the members of Stono Echo. Paten Locke speaks first.

Stono Echo: I think it’s right around where we wanted to be at this point. I think we’re about six or seven days in. I think that’s fair enough. We’re hoping for something like that… we want to be able to have at least a respectable number within the first week to have confidence going forward.”

Music Cue: “Outer Limits” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: Myztroh and Paten, who is also known as P-Locke, have been friends for about five years, but only began making music together as Stono Echo about a year and a half ago. In the scheme of crowdfunding artists, 18 months is early in an act’s career to have enough support to launch a successful campaign.

That’s a red flag.

But Stono Echo do have a label helping them out, it’s Paten Locke’s Full Plate label, which means they’re working with an email list of about 1,900 people. But the Full Plate connection was useful for more than that: it’s how they formed their band. Jay Myztroh was helping out with instrumental backing tracks on a project for the label, and he confided in Paten that he was also a singer. Paten gave him three beats that day, and Myztroh quickly provided the first verse of the song “Outer Limits.” That’s the song that you’re hearing looping in the background. Here’s Jay Myztroh:

Jay Myztroh of Stono Echo: He was personally an inspiration for the song, not just with the music, but with work ethic, and his methods and kind of what he does. And what he brings musically on a daily basis as himself. That was an inspiration for where lining up with things I’d always be keeping myself from doing. So, it’s like Stono Echo, or just before that time period, I had recommitted to my intentions on this plane. And I pretty much expressed that through that song, and it resonated with him a lot.

Pat Healy: So when somebody says something about recommitting their intentions on this plane, that’s the kind of thing I’ll need to ask a follow-up about.

Jay Myztroh of Stono Echo: That particular moment comes from when my cousin passed. She passed a day before my birthday. Somebody who I had been growing up with a majority of my life and I expected to grow old with. I just saw myself in a position where I wasn’t in any bands. I was doing cover music. As an artist, it does something else to me when I’m presenting original music to people and they’re receiving it. But when my cousin passed, it was like, ‘what am I really here for? I could be gone tomorrow and I could have been doing something else.

Music Cue: “Holdin’” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: That’s “Holdin’” by Stono Echo you’re hearing in the background. So this heartfelt tale that Myztroh shared about reaffirming his existence on this plane, that’s important. It makes me appreciate Stono Echo’s music even more. Think about your favorite musicians. If you dig their origin story, it makes you like them even more, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing, that anecdote never appears on Stono Echo’s Indiegogo page, or in the 5 minutes and 16 seconds of their intro video.

So when I asked Molly Neuman, who was Kickstarter’s first head of music, the number one thing she encourages artists to do when they begin a campaign, she said …

Molly Neuman: To make sure that their story makes sense, that they know what they’re talking about, that they’re presenting it … They’re explaining and sharing what the music is, and why people would want to be excited about it, I think that requirement is what is the real benefit.

Pat Healy: Alright, then! Let’s look at some stories that fit that bill; stories that make sense and are presented well, and get people excited to contribute.

Take the story of Gift of Gab. A rapper best known for his work in Blackalicious in the early part of this century. He underwent surgery for kidney failure in 2012, and has had to undergo dialysis three times a week since then, which doesn’t exactly make it easy to tour. A big chunk of his income just gone in a flash. In 2017 he joined the subscriber-based crowdfunding site Patreon, and currently has more than 400 patrons, making monthly contributions so that he can continue to make a living from music. On a personal note, it was really special for me to reconnect with Gab. He was the first professional musician I interviewed years ago when I started my career in music journalism.

Pat Healy (to Gift of Gab): So you remember me, right?

Gift of Gab: I don’t know, man. I’ve probably … vaguely, man. You know, there’s a lot of interviews that have gone down, bro.

Pat Healy (to podcast listeners): Sorry! I couldn’t resist! Anyway, Gab’s story inspired a lot of patrons to come forward and share inspiring stories of their own.

Gift of Gab: I’ve gotten a couple people who have gotten their kidney transplants talk to me and tell me that I really inspire them. I’ve got a bunch of stuff like that. People just in general, telling me that they’re inspired by the fact that I am on dialysis but, at the same time, I’m still doing my music. I’m not letting it stop me. Somebody actually reached out and offered me a kidney. That was really … shout out to them. They know who they are. But, that has to be the most inspirational one.

Pat Healy:  Or take the story of Jason Becker. And when I say “story,” I mean, not only the truth of what happened to this guy, but the actual “story” that he told with on his Indiegogo page! So, in 1990, he was a 20-year-old guitar virtuoso who had just replaced 30-year-old guitar virtuoso Steve Vai in David Lee Roth’s band. After completing work on Roth’s 1991 album, A Little Ain’t Enough, Becker began to suffer the early effects of ALS, which would rob him of the ability to play music or even speak. But Jason continued to compose music with the aid of a communication device his father invented. With a 2016 IndieGoGo campaign, he was looking to raise money for production, studio time, and musicians.

If your story’s good enough or you tell it well enough, it might even attract the assistance of someone who works for the crowdfunding site itself, whose job it is to help you get your funding. John Trigonis, campaign strategist for film and music at Indiegogo, assisted Jason Becker’s campaign.

John Trigonis: That was definitely a trip, and emotional and inspiring at the same time … I totally got into the story that he was telling, and I saw his talent, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me reach out to see if they’re open to advice.’ And if they’re open to the advice and they’ve taken it, and if they want more, then I’ll kind of jump in and work with them a little bit more in depthly. So with them, I was reaching out, at one point, every week. And they were back and forth with me. I would set up some promotion for them on the Indiegogo site, on social media, try to get them in our newsletter, and stuff like that.

Pat Healy: So there’s a lesson right there. If you’re approached by a representative from the crowdfunding platform where you—or an artist you represent—are running your campaign, that’s usually a good thing! It can mean they like your story, it can mean they like the amount of backers you already have, and it can lead to greater exposure on the site and via social media.

Music Cue: “Pretty Good” by Dutch Rebelle

Pat Healy:  Okay, so we’ve got three decent—if somewhat DIY—intro videos from our artists so far, but it’s mostly the music that will likely stand out and drive these campaigns.

Last up is Dutch ReBelle, a rapper based in Boston, MA, who has 30 days to raise $15,000 via Kickstarter to record her brand new album Bang Bang, a follow-up to her 2015 release, Kiss Kiss. Get a load of her intro video.

Dutch ReBelle Pledge Video: I always say when people try to put you in a box, stand on top of the box and blow up the fucking box, and that’s what Bang Bang is supposed to be.

Pat Healy:  Now THAT is an opening! It’s hard to summarize what’s happening in her video, the way I did with everybody else’s, because there’s just so much action in it. First there’s footage of her performing at a packed outdoor show on the Boston Common. Then she’s sitting in front of a recording console. There’s footage of her laying down vocal tracks in the studio, action clips from various videos she’s released prior to the campaign, B-roll of her street team hanging up flyers, purple vinyl spinning on a turntable. In other words, this video is well-produced with lots of edits. In her video, she says this is a campaign of inclusion, where pledging will enable you to become a part of her project, rather than just a backer.

Dutch Rebelle Pledge Video: Recording, mixing, producing a record is a super, super expensive process and I’ve been doing it by myself since the very beginning. I’m excited for the Kickstarter because it’s giving my fans—people who really have been with me since the beginning—a real front seat at what happens. Your support is gonna help me to take Bang Bang as just a project of dope songs, and to be, mix-wise at its best potential, mastering at its best potential.

Pat Healy:  This theme of “we’re in this together” is consistent throughout the three minutes and 45 seconds of her video.

Dutch ReBelle Pledge Video: Now it’s time for everybody who’s been like, ‘Yo, I wanna help. I have this to offer.’ Now it’s like, ‘alright, let’s do this. Let’s really see how big we can blow this up!’  Because it’s not just about Dutch ReBelle, it’s about anybody who speaks this language.

Pat Healy:  She’s three days into her campaign when we connect.

Dutch ReBelle Pledge Video: Right now I’m at like 19 backers or something like that. That’s dope, even two is great. It’s highly possible that I don’t get it all funded, but it’s also just as possible that I do, because it’s something that I’ve never done before. There’s a lot of people not trying things because they don’t know how it’s gonna go, but it’s because all they’re focused on is the end as opposed to all the people I’m talking to as I’m on this campaign. Like I straight feel like a politician.

Pat Healy:  So here’s somebody with a well-produced video. We don’t necessarily get her full story, per se, but because of the pacing, the professional quality of the video, and the excitement of the clips, you feel she’s on the cusp and you’re psyched to get on board.

So I’ve spoken with all of these artists and I’ve been getting to enjoy them, in some part because of our conversations and hearing their personal stories. But how would these intro videos connect to somebody who had never listened to these artists’ music or gotten to know them on any level? I played all four intro videos for somebody who would have an unbiased or critical eye.

Jim Horan:  My name is Jim Horan and I’m teaching the Artist Management course for Berklee Online’s master’s program.

Pat Healy: And Jim Horan was indeed critical of their videos! Here are a few of his more critical words …

Jim Horan: I don’t think any of them are great … For one thing, I think they go on far too long. It was just a little bit too casual …

Pat Healy: But Jim Horan did have quite a lot of constructive criticism to share as well …

Jim Horan: You’re basically selling your music to people who are gonna be watching these videos. They might even be existing fans, but even for those existing fans, I think you want them to get excited about what you’re doing. Give your fans or your potential fans a reason to wanna click on that link and to go pledge some money, whether it’s Pledge or Kickstarter or whatever. Obviously, you want your video to be as strong as possible. Maybe there’s something you can do with your video that’s going to compel PledgeMusic, for instance, to feature it; even if you don’t have a big fan base, they’re gonna say, “This is such a great video. We’re gonna do an email blast for you. We’re gonna feature it on our homepage, etc.”

Pat Healy: So, you got that, performers? You hear that, managers of performers? Get your videos in shape! If you have an interesting story, make sure you’re telling that story to the world. In your video!  

Oh, and before we close out this episode, let’s check in on Johnny Chops again. Remember he’s got a longer period to make his goal: 60 days. Some time has passed, since we last spoke.

I’m reaching you on the road today, huh?

Johnny Chops: Yes, sir. I’m in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Pat Healy: Nice. You have a set of dates out there?

Johnny Chops: Yeah, I’m out here with Randy Rogers band.

Pat Healy: How’s the campaign been going so far?

Johnny Chops: It’s going really well man, we’re at 22 percent.

Pat Healy: Yeah? Is that where you’d hoped to be at this time?

Johnny Chops: Yeah, I’m real happy with it, man. We’ve got some pretty good responses from some things, we’re sitting on about a thousand bucks or so, I think.

Pat Healy: And we’re sitting on three more episodes of suspense, intrigue, money and music. Join me next week to hear more of The Roaring Crowdfund.

Music Cue: “The Castle” by Emily Keener

CREDITS

Pat Healy: The Roaring Crowdfund was made possible by Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. Today’s podcast was written and produced by me, Pat Healy, edited, mixed, and mastered  by Joel Thibodeau at Spake. Additional editing by Andrew Walls. Special thanks to Gabriel Ryfer Cohen for additional mastering on this episode, Cristina Daura, who designed the graphics, Tim Scholl and Steve Zimmerman, who made the website look so good, and Andrea Taylor, the voice actor.

Once again I encourage you to look up our featured artists and to check out their music, but their crowdfunding campaigns are all over, so I advise you not to peek at those pages until after you’ve listened to the whole series. For additional assets like photos and videos, a handy crowdfunding spreadsheet, and links to the specific tracks used in this episode, visit the episode page at theroaringcrowdfund.com (yes, we’ve got a vanity URL!), and check us out at online.berklee.edu as well, or just consult the Roaring Crowdfund playlist on Spotify.

Episode 3 is next, and it’s all about the PERKS!

THE ROARING CROWDFUND EPISODE 3: Perks, Rewards, Support, and Skydiving in Diapers

Note: Transcripts of episodes for The Roaring Crowdfund are generated using a combination of a pre-written script (and occasional improvisation) for narration and a transcription service for interviews. Since this material is meant to be listened to, we highly encourage you to experience it that way. If you are quoting any portions of this episode, please check the corresponding audio.

Music Cue: “Ten Cent Talkers” by Johnny Chops

Pat Healy: What do you want from the people whose music you like? Good music, obviously, but what about ya know, like … stuff? What about when they’re asking you to help them? Help them make an album or help them go on tour? They’re in kind of a compromising position, don’t ya think? This is your chance to “get” something from them.

Because any music crowdfunding campaign that’s going to successfully separate you from your money will usually have some personal element to it. Check out any of the sites I’m profiling on this podcast. Look at that column on the right-hand side. On PledgeMusic it says, “featured items,” on Kickstarter, it says “support,” as in “support this artist by clicking on one of the featured items,” and on Indiegogo, they’re a little bit more upfront about it all. They say, “Select a Perk.” But the right-hand side of all of these campaign pages might as well say, “what’s in it for me?” “What do I get?”

Music Cue: “Reminder” by Johnny Chops

On this episode we’ll get into the perks, the rewards, the “what do I gets?” What you get is your favorite acts making remix albums with cat sounds, performing at your house, daring you to skydive with them, but instead doing drunken karaoke with you, sending you vials of blood, having you sign their nude bodies and more.

My name is Pat Healy, and this is The Roaring Crowdfund!: a five-part podcast series from Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. We’ll examine four very different musical acts, and follow their progress across various crowdfunding platforms.

And I’ve found some amazing acts that we’ll follow:  a singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter

Emily Keener: “Hello. I’m Emily Keener”

Pat Healy: A hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo

Stono Echo: “Hey, this is Paten Locke, and Jay Myztroh, and we’re Stono Echo!”

Pat Healy: A rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic

Johnny Chops: “Howdy. I’m Johnny Chops.”

Pat Healy: And a rapper from Boston on Kickstarter

Dutch ReBelle: Yup, yup, yup, yow. I’m Dutch ReBelle.”

Pat Healy: What would you pay to hear your favorite musicians remix their entire upcoming album … wait! Before you answer, there’s more … remix their entire album using as backing tracks … only the sounds of cats …

[CAT SOUNDS]

Pat Healy: That was the question that hip-hop duo Run the Jewels asked their fans, as they announced a pre-order campaign for their second album, RTJ2 in 2014. Also among the rewards available to backers: A Run the Jewels Retirement Package, where for $10 million, Killer Mike and EL-P of Run the Jewels would retire from music and make only one song per year, for YOU personally.

For $100,000 —a fraction of the retirement package price, but still not very affordable—the duo would come to your town and help you seek revenge on an enemy (murder not included, but they promise to make your enemies’ pets love you).

For an even more reasonable $55,000 (but let’s be honest, still not affordable) Run The Jewels would show up at your doorstep, “dressed in clothing made of candy to rap both albums to you personally over the beats of your choice and wish you a happy birthday (or any other occasion). And then they say, “We will then spend the day playing contact ultimate frisbee with your family and friends, ending at dusk where we will build a small, possibly illegal bonfire and drink until one of us urinates where we are sitting.”

And for $40,000, the “Meow the Jewels” reward, where Run The Jewels would re-record RTJ2 using nothing but cat sounds for music. Now, all these rewards—This was all a joke, right? Yes, and no.

Just days after Run the Jewels activated their campaign on daylightcurfew.com—the band’s label—a fan named Sly Jones started his own campaign on Kickstarter to raise the $40,000 to make sure Meow the Jewels happened. Less than a month later, more than 2,000 backers had fully funded the project … with 15 days to go!

The project ended up raising more than $60,000, and Killer Mike and El-P donated the money to charity. It was a turning point in the history of online crowdfunding for music, where the fans mobilized and made something happen. Demanded something from the artists.

This gets down to the essence of why online crowdfunding for music took off in the first place: it makes the fans feel like they’re an integral part of the creative process. Sometimes it’s just an illusion. Sometimes artists have already completed the album that they’re funding, and pretend they’re still working on it. This DOES happen, by the way! But in this case it was 100 percent all about the fans who made it happen.

They knew what they wanted, and they knew how to get it: money! And Sly Jones wasn’t the only fan to get involved so directly. A 21-year-old student named Joel Nixon designed the cover for Meow the Jewels. Based in Toronto, Ontario, he was an animation major at Seneca College when he saw the project pop up on social media.

Joel Nixon: Yeah, I guess finding it on Twitter, myself, I figured “Well this is cool but they don’t have any kind of defining artwork for it.” And so I decided to remix their actual cover art with the cat paws and the collar instead of the gun and fist …

Pat Healy: He was surprised that nobody had thought of the twist on the concept.

Joel Nixon: It wasn’t even that they asked me to do it. I just did it on a whim and then I sent it to the guy running the Twitter account and El-P had started communicating and were trying to kind of push this thing, and I just chimed in with this drawing that I made in an afternoon and they picked it up and they were really excited about it. And then people started writing articles with my drawing and stuff. It’s still a very surreal experience. My name is in the liner notes, which is still one of my prouder achievements … And then they ended up sending me twice as much as they said they would … I have a physical copy of it that I actually had to purchase, order myself. I was frustrated about it for a long time, but that’s water under the bridge now, but yeah.

Pat Healy: I get a kick out of the fact that Joel Nixon received more money from the project than he thought he would, but he still had to buy his own copy! Anyway, the idea of having to remix an entire album with cat sounds seems terrifying. Think about how much time that would eat up, even if you had $40 grand at your disposal. But since Run the Jewels had decided to make it a charitable cause—and since Run the Jewels are really  famous!—they got a lot of their famous friends to pitch in.

We’re talking remixing royalty here: Prince Paul, Dan the Automator, Zola Jesus, and more.  All doing remixes with just cat sounds as backgrounds. And since there some variety in who’s doing the remixes, there is mercifully some variety in the cat sounds used.

[ANGRY CAT SOUND]

Pat Healy: But not all musicians have enough clout to get other musicians to join in on the fun, so time commitment needs to be one of the chief considerations of planning perks. Luiz Augusto Buff is a lawyer who is teaching the Berklee Online graduate course Music Business Finance. He and Berklee professor Peter Alhadeff—who authored the Music Business Finance course—wrote an important research paper about online music crowdfunding a few years ago.

It’s important because they concluded that most musicians who ran crowdfunding campaigns and may have been reaching their stated financial goals were ultimately paying out of pocket to provide these perks, or spending way too much time fulfilling personal rewards.

Luiz Augosto Buff: They were not necessarily successful, because they’ve raised that money, but that money was not necessarily enough to cover all the costs of that project. So we came up with a strategy to analyze your goals, and to calculate how much you actually have to raise, in order to have the funds available for you. So, to understand the costs of raising money through crowdfunding. How to better calculate for the cost of the platform by itself, the cost of the rewards themselves, which can add up a lot in a campaign. Both with time management, as well as the costs, themselves, as we’ve mentioned.

Pat Healy: What Luiz Augusto Buff and Peter Alhadeff did next was to devise a spreadsheet to help artists determine how much they’d spend on their campaign, so they wouldn’t be left in the lurch.

One of the most important considerations of choosing which perks to offer is to know thy fanbase. Luiz brings up Maria Schneider, a jazz artist who first brought national attention to crowdfunding for music when she won a Grammy for her 2004 album Concert in the Garden, an album which was made possible by ArtistShare. Remember I told you about ArtistShare in episode 1? They were the first online music crowdfunding site, and they basically invented the model, but they also function more like a label than sites like Pledge Music, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter.

To give you a sense of what kind of artist Maria Schneider is….I mean she’s a Grammy Award winning jazz artist. This is serious stuff. And on a recent ArtistShare project listed perks such as a credit listing on a published score of hers, personal calls with Maria as she updated you on the progress of the piece, a glimpse into rehearsals, either through video or actually attending if you’re available. So Luiz spoke of this type of perk in relation to Amanda Palmer, whose perks were a little more up close and personal.

Luiz Augosto Buff: I think that the biggest example of all is Amanda Palmer, who is the queen of understanding her fan base. And one of the rewards that she had was to invite the fan who contributed at that level to a private party, and she would be naked in that party, and the fan would sign her body with a pen, in that party. Look how interesting that example is. Like, it’s a total reversion of everything. And she comes from the punk culture, right? So that’s why it has this naked body, all of those interesting details, but it’s the fan who’s signing the artist’s body. It’s not the artists that are signing, that is giving the autograph, okay? It’s a huge symbol, that example, I think. And that comes with understanding the fan base. I think if Maria Schneider had done that, it wouldn’t work, you know?

Pat Healy: Not everybody can offer rewards like these and finance their projects. Not everybody can make their naked bodies available as canvases for fans’ signatures. Not everybody can offer to make a full remix album of cat sounds.

Jayce Varden is a Berklee Online teacher and co-founder of PledgeMusic has presided over some pretty weird reward.

Jayce Varden: There was a time back in the early days where we were working with the Gang of Four and they wanted to include vials of their own blood in a package. So you had to go through the NIH or Health and Human Services in the UK to determine ‘can we ship blood?’ … in general a lot of it is the experiential stuff. It’s about humanizing the artist and I think pulling out their adventurous side. So you know, when Guster came up with something like ‘Shit Your Pants with Guster,’ which was jump out of a plane with them you know, go skydiving with them. Or Ryan would come and DJ your house party in a Chewbacca suit. I mean those are the highlights because it’s nice to feel as though you’re getting to know the artist beyond them just selling a package of music.

Pat Healy: Wait. “Shit Your Pants with Guster”? That was dropped in way too casually. I need more info on this! So let’s see. Who might be a good person to talk to?

Brian Rosenworcel: My name is Brian Rosenworcel. I play drums for the band, Guster. And we did a Pledge campaign for our 2015 record, Evermotion.

Pat Healy: Okay. This guy will do!

Brian Rosenworcel: I believe Shit Your Pants with Guster was just one of many things that we offered to our fans, that they didn’t buy. So, Shit Your Pants with Guster was a $10,000 prize where you would get to go skydiving with Ryan and Adam. And we did a lot of these high-ticket items, thinking we were really creative, and cool, and we’d raise money. And no one bought them. In the event that someone purchased it, Luke and I wanted nothing to do with it. So, the two brave members of Guster would’ve gone skydiving with you for $10,000. I think we overestimated our fans’ wallets, and their ability to access them for this.

Pat Healy: So as Guster’s campaign ran on, and no fans were selecting the more outrageous perks, Brian found a perk they would be interested in.

Brian Rosenworcel: There was like, a “Karaoke with Me” offered, and I’m kinda notorious in that I have a terrible singing voice, and yet they let me sing the last song of the night from time to time, on special occasions. So those who are in the know, and didn’t wanna pass up on it, were like, three people. Three girls in New York. And we didn’t raise a lot of money. I don’t know what they paid. Maybe like, 100 bucks. And I went out, and I brought my friend Dave, who’s the singer in the Zambonis, and we went with these three random fans to a karaoke place in Koreatown in Manhattan, and we instantly just got absolutely wasted. And we started singing, “One Man Wrecking Machine,” by Guster, to break the ice, ‘cuz that was the only Guster song in the booklet. And then it just got more and more drunk. And we were having so much fun. And the  where we drank more alcohol out of a watermelon that was sliced in half — you know how they do that? And the night ended with me taking a cab home and throwing up in my sink, on my children’s toy boats.

Pat Healy: Wait. Throwing up in the sink?

Brian Rosenworcel: There is a dilemma in that moment, about whether you’re gonna choose the toilet or the sink. Or actually, for most people, that’s not a dilemma. You just choose the toilet. But for me, it was a dilemma. And I believe that standing and leaning on a sink, and looking at yourself in that mirror has more dignity than kneeling on the floor of the bathroom where people have recently pooped. I feel like there’s no dignity there.

Pat Healy: Okay, dignity or no dignity, or no diggitty. Was it worth it?

Brian Rosenworcel: We looked at the numbers, and we’d actually spent more money than we took in, so we were like, negative 50 bucks on that one. That’s a microcosm for our PledgeMusic experience. A lot of good randomness, but not a lot of money.

Pat Healy: Know thy fans, but know how to limit the amount of money that you spend to make them happy!

Now, what about the artists I’m profiling, let’s take a look at some of the things they’re offering!

Andrea Taylor: Wanna show some love, but don’t have any fem fems at the moment? Shoot us a dollar and we’ll give you a shoutout on social media …
Pledge $10 or more, you’ll receive a pre-release digital download of the new album …
$11, personalized holiday postcard …
$15, a drink koozie and a sticker …
Pledge $25 or more, a signed copy of the new album …
$30, trucker hats with the band logo …
$50, the song of your choosing written out by hand in a very special way …
$100, hang with the band …
$250 or more, custom 16-bar verse for one of your tracks …
$350 or more, private online concert …
$400 or more, I’ll write a love song from you to your significant other, parent, child, friend, or pet …
$1,500 or more, an hour and a half long acoustic performance for you and up to 50 friends …
$2.500, we’ll come to your place with our gear to play for you and all your friends …

Pat Healy: Alright, that’s a lot of what Brian Rosenworcel would call “good randomness,” mixed in with perks that could actually earn these artists money. And plus, the artists have given these rewards all sorts of cool titles like …

Andrea Taylor: The National Tour Producer,  The Street Team Experience, Yeah I’m on the List, Lil Dondatta, A Charitable Gift of Music, The Beat Battle Experience, Shit’s Gettin’ Romantic, Shit’s Gettin’ Personal, P-Locke Exclusive Beat, Social Media Shoutout, Personalized  Holiday Postcard, Signed Handwritten Lyric Sheet, The Big One, The Exclusive, The Novice, The Hired Gun, The Troubadour, The Everything.

Pat Healy: So let’s talk about some of the more unique offerings.

Here’s Boston rapper Dutch ReBelle talking about the perk she calls “the Feature Experience.”

We’ll get to the specifics of how much money she has left to raise later in the episode, but I will share with you that she has nine days left in her 30-day campaign. And one backer has just pledged the amount that will get them “The Feature Experience” if Dutch ReBelle meets her $15,000 goal to make her new album.

Dutch ReBelle: I send a personal message to everyone who pledged so we talked, and I tried to get information like, “How do you know me?” Stuff like that.

Pat Healy: What was the most extreme example of that? Somebody just from a place –

Dutch ReBelle: Ecuador.

Pat Healy: Yeah?

Dutch ReBelle: Like going through my Facebook inbox, I was like, “Hey.” He had asked me for a feature years ago, I’m like, “Well, there’s a great opportunity right now because I have my Feature Experience Package and I have my Collab Experience Package. Those are just two of them.” He’s like, “Well, I’m in Ecuador now, so how do I send it?” I’m like, “oh nice!”

Pat Healy: So that noise in the background, that’s the sound of Dutch ReBelle’s dayjob. Since we’re both based in Boston, I paid her a visit at Salon Hairapy in Malden, Mass., where she is a manager, a receptionist, and, well …

Dutch ReBelle: I kind of handle all the operational stuff. I do everything, but hair, is the easiest way to explain that.

Pat Healy: Her co-workers didn’t seem to mind her taking some time to talk to me. Anyway, the Collab Experience Package and the Feature Experience Package are both real bargains!

Dutch ReBelle: In this situation, if you’re just getting a feature then you’re going to get a verse. Whatever you want, you’re going to get it, but a collaborative experience it’s like we’re both in the studio. We can do it up. That’s why I’m pushing that one. And     My numbers are a little different outside of the Kickstarter!

Pat Healy:  She normally charges more than $450 for a feature. On Kickstarter she’s charging $250.

Another exciting reward that Dutch ReBelle is offering: The Beat Battle Experience. Let’s go back to our voiceover actress to hear that one described again …

Andrea Taylor: Pledge $50 or more: The Beat Battle Experience. Submit your track to be considered as a collaboration on the Bang Bang project. The battle and selection process will take place during week three of the campaign on Instagram/FB Live. Dutch and the crowd will choose while you watch! You can submit as many tracks as you want, for $10 per track, after the first. Includes track submission, autographed Bang Bang CD, Dutch ReBelle T-shirt, and digital download of Bang Bang!

Pat Healy: That’s a really cool reward, but what’s funny is that Dutch ReBelle is noticing some people are signing up for this reward based solely on the pricing tier.

Dutch ReBelle: I have uncles from Miami that are in the beat battle. I’m like, “Bro, what the hell? You don’t … Wilmer?

Pat Healy: Wilmer, that’s the guy’s name?

Dutch ReBelle: Yeah, it’s like Wilmer. Certain people, and I’m like, You don’t make beats. You just picked the $50 you saw 50 and just hit that.

Pat Healy:  Cleveland-based singer/songwriter Emily Keener is offering songwriting lessons: $150 via Skype for a one-hour session. She’s 10 days into her 30-day campaign, and two people have already claimed that perk, and they’ll get it, IF she raises the $9,999 to make her new album. I’ll give you her money update later, but first let’s talk about these perks she’s offering.

Emily Keener: I just wanted to make the rewards interesting, doable, for me as far as my time and commitment. But also, show people that I want to give them back as much as they’re giving to me, if that makes sense? I’ve started my journey as a songwriting teacher and, it’s incredibly individualized because, there’s no way that I could teach two different people how to song write the same way.

Pat Healy: And Jay Myztroh of Stono Echo—the hip-hop duo from Jacksonville we’re tracking—is offering a half-hour piano lesson for $30. Stono Echo are also 10 days into THEIR 30-day campaign, and one backer has already claimed this reward.

Jay Myztroh: I spend quite a few hours of my life now teaching piano so, I’ll throw another 30 minutes in there.

Pat Healy: Now these are somewhat unique opportunities, and intimate connections with these artists! But not all perks have to be unique to work. One common perk that unites all of the artists I’m profiling is the chance to book them at a place of your choosing.

Listen to these numbers and think about the out-of-pocket money and time involved. Do these amounts make sense?

Dutch ReBelle offers a live 25-minute set experience anywhere in the New England area for $500. For $1,000 she’ll do a longer set, and for $7,000 she’ll go anywhere in the US to perform for you.

Johnny Chops, the Austin-based rocker we’re tracking, offers a solo acoustic show for $1,000, which includes the opportunity for YOU to pick his setlist, and choose three covers (within reason). A full Johnny Chops & the Razors show—well that will set you back $2,500.

Stono Echo offers an $800 reward they call the Lil Dondatta. It’s them performing the full Black Diamonds album live for you.  Or, for just $250 more, you could get the full Dondatta. $1,050: Stono Echo performs the fill album for you live, accompanied by the Dora Melage, who are an intense trio of backup singers and dancers.

Emily Keener offers the most levels of the live experience, EIGHT in total. Including the Emily-gram, which is a surprise performance for $300, a private online show for $350, a charitable show for $700, where you can send Emily to a nursing home, hospital, shelter, etc.

A solo Ohio house concert for $700, a full band Ohio concert for $1,500, and a US 90-minute acoustic show for $1,500 that she’s offering under the title of “USA Sad Girl Has Songs, Will Travel.” So Sad Girl really does seem Keen on coming to you for a few shows. And her fans seem Keen on making it happen. I mean, at least 10 days into her campaign, they do. More on how financially close she is to reaching her goal later!

Emily Keener: I think, yesterday we had the biggest donation at $700 for the house concert here in Ohio and I had a bunch of different levels of the house concert that you could get, depending on what state you’re in or if you want my band with me or just a solo performance and that kind of stuff. That was a pleasant surprise to have somebody go in on that. People haven’t really been shy as far as how much they’re giving and what they’re willing to pledge and how much they’re willing to share with their friends and get the word out there about what’s going on. I really appreciated that aspect of it, too.

Pat Healy: I don’t like to be cynical, but I had to ask each of these artists “aren’t you at least a little scared of going to some strangers’ house?”

Emily Keener: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, it was definitely a little bit nerve-racking and you know, a couple of my friends/older brother type friends are like, “Let’s not do that.” At the same time it’s like, I found that the people who are willing to donate that much money in the first place are people that have been following me for years and are good friends of mine. I don’t typically  get some really random people asking me to come to some random place. And, if there ever is a sketchy situation where I’m not comfortable, obviously, I’ll take measures to come up with an alternative reward. Or, take some people with me cause, you never want to be in a risky situation like that but at the same time, most of the time, the people are cool and you know them.

Pat Healy: I asked Johnny Chops if he was nervous about being led to some remote place, never to be heard from again. And if you’re a horror movie writer, please allow my personal paranoia to serve as inspiration to you … and then hire me as a consultant on you  r script. Maybe call it KILLstarter?

Anyway, Johnny Chops is less concerned about abduction-by-crowdfunding-backer than I am, but it is on his mind.

Johnny Chops: That did occur to me. But I figure, if it gets my record out, I’m willin’ to risk it. That’s an acceptable level of risk for me.

Pat Healy: You hear that? These musicians are willing to die to raise enough money to make a living doing what they love! Seriously though, the worst that could usually happen is just a certain level of awkwardness.

Pat Healy: Mike Doughty, who came to prominence in the 1990s with his band Soul Coughing, has found a comfortable way to supplement his touring income through crowdfunding. First, through a few campaigns on PledgeMusic, and currently on Patreon, the monthly-subscriber funding platform. Initially, he wasn’t so sure about these super-intimate shows.

Mike Doughty: Yeah. Those were much more fun than I thought they would be. When I did that and a bunch of people paid for it, and I was like, “Oh my God. What have I done?” But it turned out to be really great. It was just like playing a show, except you’ve got a super intimate environment. I did the living room show thing for a while, and that was not as good as just playing to a guy and his two friends. Or one time a guy flew his wife to New York. It was really kind of sweet, because they were from North Carolina. He’s just like, “Let’s have a holiday in New York.” They get in a cab and go out to some weird industrial building in Greenpoint where my studio was. She has no idea what was going on. She knocked on the door and I opened it, and she freaked out. It was really funny. Stuff like that’s great. She didn’t freak out screaming like a Beatles fan or something. But it was just very clear that she had been set up, and it was this really wonderful thing for her. Stuff like that’s great. You live for stuff like that.

Pat Healy: Mike Doughty has had to say no to a few shows that he thought were a little too intimate.

Mike Doughty: A guy wanted me to be basically the backing band for him proposing to his girlfriend. I was like, “You know what? I don’t think … that’s kind of a little bit too much to ask.” Generally anything related to weddings is not worth getting into. There’s just, it’s just clusterfuckery.

Pat Healy: Ted Leo also has been dealing with his own case of clusterfuckery, based partially on offering very intimate rewards. During his 2017 Kickstarter campaign to make his album, The Hanged Man, 20 backers chose the reward of having Ted Leo prepare a vegan meals for them. Nine backers chose the reward of having Ted Leo write a personal song for them.

Ted Leo: The thing funded in April of last year and I got the record out by September, which is pretty unheard of in this day and age. That was kind of my priority was to make sure that everybody got the record ASAP and then I was on tour for the entire fall, so I’m still working on fulfilling all this stuff. Right now, I’m kind of deep in the personal song zone right now. I’m trying to finish those. I’ll be 100 percent honest about this too: People who don’t understand that normally it takes about a year to get a record out at all these days are definitely starting to get impatient and I’m getting some angry emails. That’s not fun to deal with, but it’s all in process. It’s all happening. The meals I’m going to actually plan … I haven’t mapped it all out geographically, but I’m going to try and do those as a tour where I’ll do a solo show and have the meal, you know?

Pat Healy: So how about these personalized songs?

Ted Leo: I asked people to sort of give me some input as to what they were looking for, like did they want this to be for a specific person; did they want it to be, etc. Most people have been actually been pretty like … It’s been more like, “here’s this other person’s life,” “Maybe I want it to be more about them, the other person I care about “or whatever.” So it’s been… I’ve been generally free to sort of take the muse where I wanted it to go. I do have one person who wrote a book and they wanted a song sort of from … that would like come out of the book,

Pat Healy: Oh wow.

Ted Leo: So that was kind of cool.

Pat Healy: I mention to Ted Leo how funny it would be if Elvis Costello only wrote “Allison” because a fan by that name paid him to do so. He laughs a little bit about this, but is quick to point out that this isn’t a direction he wants the music industry to go in. Because this sort of thing puts us back in the Middle Ages!

Ted Leo: You know, That’s where it starts to get uncomfortable for me again because Serfdom in a capitalist society is not good. Then again, like … Whatever. If the need to compose a few things like that by specific request enables one to continue to compose the rest of what one wants to, then I guess that again that’s one of those trade-offs that not only the positives outweigh the negatives but oftentimes can be all positives.

Pat Healy: Stono Echo are offering personalized songs, and Paten Locke says that he extended the same offer with a previous crowdfunding project he did.

Paten Locke: A bunch of people bought songs, like we were doing the personalized songs, we ended up getting like five or something, sold like five of them. I think my mom might’ve bought one actually. I think she bought one and she wanted us to do a song about human resources, which is where her profession was. and now she has since retired and we didn’t do the song. So I guess we’ll have to do a retirement song.

Jay Myztroh: A retirement song. One of the songs was purchased by a pal of ours that … just a guy who also makes music and such. So a guy we know in the game, a good guy we mess with and I think over the years he was trying to arrange collaborations, and I know I’m kind of very picky about collabo’s and stuff, it has to be the right musical thing that I want to do and I don’t think we ever, we never got to that point where he had sent me something where I was like, “I’ll do this.” So there was a bunch of years, five, six years maybe of going, of never, of me never okay-ing and saying, “Alright I’ll rap on this or I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” you know? Then he bought a song. I was like, “Oh well shit that’s one way around that, isn’t it?” If he hears this, happens to hear this and infers that it’s him, I love you. [laughter]

Pat Healy: Emily Keener is offering personalized songs too. Has she ever written a song for anybody as a made-to-order product?

Emily Keener: I haven’t. I feel like I’ve written some stuff on assignment before, but never, necessarily, for anyone else. I may have been inspired personally to write something for someone or about someone, but never as a gift or as a reward.

Pat Healy: And almost all of the artists we’re profiling are offering some sort of handwritten or signed ephemera. Putting your autograph on a piece of merch is something that Luiz Augusto Buff says is one of the most efficient ways to mak e a profit in a crowdfunding campaign.

Luiz Augusto Buff: So what is most interesting, when creating the rewards, and creating the level of rewards, is to add value as experiences to those fans. And be creative when you do that, so you add value for them, that you can charge in exchange, without incurring most costs. A classic example of this would be, for $20, you could send for the fan a CD, right, of that album. And for $30, or $35, you could send an autographed CD. Okay? So you added value. Your hardcore fans would like, if they are contributing to a campaign, they would contribute $15, $20 more for an autographed CD instead of just a general one, okay? And the cost of doing that, it’s close to zero. Of course, you could say that there is the time that the artist would set out to sit down and sign a bunch of CDs, right? There’s a lot of time around an artist’s schedule to do that, right? Just be creative, and be available to do that for your fans, right?

Pat Healy: Johnny Chops has lately had some luck with his John Hancock.

Johnny Chops: Somebody did buy a ticket to the listening party, which is kinda cool; that’s a nice little bonus. But, mostly signed CDs. That’s been the main thing. A lot of signed CDs, and a lot of downloads, and the real simple stuff seems to be working the best.

Pat Healy: Okay, let’s check in on the actual monetary status of all of our Roaring Crowdfund artists. Last time Johnny and I talked, he was at 22 percent of his $5,000 goal. Now, with two weeks to go, Johnny Chops is at … 37 percent!

Johnny Chops: Yeah. We’re at 37 and we’re kind of stuck there actually.

Yeah. It’s been, I don’t know. I’ve tried a bunch of different things and we’re just not really getting any … It seemed to be stalled out at the moment.

Pat Healy: Johnny’s still got 2 weeks though! How about Stono Echo? Stono Echo, as i mentioned earlier, have 20 days left in their 30-day campaign, and in the week since we spoke with them, they have gotten how much closer to their $4,000 goal? Well, $50 closer. Here’s Paten Locke.

Stono Echo: Myztroh and I were just talking about how it hasn’t moved much in the last couple weeks really- week and a half or so it hasn’t moved much, and hadn’t really had much movement until this past Saturday evening. My experience with doing one in Indiegogo before, which wasn’t a pre-order, as much as it was an actual crowdfunding situation was, it was heavy in the first week and heavy in the last week. The last time I did this, we did make our goal, we exceeded our goal, but it definitely got a little hairy in the middle.

Pat Healy: 10 days into Emily Keener’s 30-day campaign, and she is almost halfway to her $9,999 goal. The stream has been steady since her first day, when she made $2,700.

Emily Keener: The first few days I think, people were very receptive and just excited to share the project because, they’ve seen me at so many shows over the past year and, they were happy with the last record so they’re ready to hear more from me. So that, excitement of the anticipation was really helpful as a catalyst in those first few days.

Pat Healy: Dutch ReBelle has nine days left in her 30-day campaign, which is to raise $15,000, and she has raised … $4,910. Just about a third of the way there.

Dutch ReBelle: You know how people like to join the party last-minute. There’s a lot of people joining in now so it’s pretty good. It’s nice too… I’m connecting with a lot of people, which is like the most important thing. And a lot of people are just like really happy that I decided to do something like that so it’s going well.

Pat Healy: So, it seems like most of our artists are experiencing a little bit of that ‘ol mid-point lull. But as Dutch ReBelle optimistically says, people often show up to the party late. When I left Dutch ReBelle at the Salon that day, I got to the corner and realized I had left my headphones behind, so I turned back around. And I learned that I was being watched!

Dutch ReBelle: I didn’t know that the girls had their hawkeye on you the whole time, actually. As soon as you left, they’re like ‘He’s leaving?! Wait, he’s not getting highlights?! Or a haircut or something?’ We have a thing, like ‘we’ve gotta get our phalanges on you!’ like We’ve gotta get the fingers in the hair. That’s why I love being here! The girls are so enthusiastic about just trying stuff. But they were very intrigued by your hair.

Pat Healy: Well, hopefully all of these hard-working, talented crowdfunding musicians, fighting to reach their goals have got their phalanges on you, listeners! In the next episode, our artists venture out alone into some scary situations, get closer to their goals (possibly financially, definitely chronologically) and maybe I’ll even explore a new hairstyle! Join us next week to hear more of the Roaring Crowdfund!

CREDITS: The Roaring Crowdfund was made possible by Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. Today’s podcast was written and produced by me, Pat Healy, edited, mixed and mastered by Joel Thibodeau at Spake. Additional editing by Andrew Walls. Special thanks to Gabriel Ryfer Cohen, Cristina Daura, who designed the graphics, Tim Scholl who made the website look so good, and Andrea Taylor, the voice actor.

Once again I encourage you to look up our featured artists and to check out their music, but their crowdfunding campaigns are all over, so I advise you not to peek at those pages until after you’ve listened to the whole series.

For additional assets like photos and videos, and the helpful spreadsheet Luiz Augusto Buff was talking about to help artists at the beginning of crowdfunding campaigns, visit the episode page at online.berklee.edu. You’ll also find links to the specific tracks used in this episode, or you can just consult the Roaring Crowdfund playlist on Spotify.

THE ROARING CROWDFUND EPISODE 4: DIY (or Do It with a Posse of Power Rangers)

Note: Transcripts of episodes for The Roaring Crowdfund are generated using a combination of a pre-written script (and occasional improvisation) for narration and a transcription service for interviews. Since this material is meant to be listened to, we highly encourage you to experience it that way. If you are quoting any portions of this episode, please check the corresponding audio.

Pat Healy: Hello listeners! Thanks so much for your enthusiasm about The Roaring Crowdfund so far. Just wanted to give you a quick update, recorded after we wrapped this whole series. The music business landscape continues to change, almost daily, and as I record this towards the end of January 2019, PledgeMusic has addressed difficulties the company faced in getting funds to musicians. It’s a situation that I couldn’t NOT mention, especially since this is a podcast that’s all about crowdfunding, but it’s a situation which continues to change as they examine new solutions, and as the different people involved and affected speak up. It’s really emblematic of where the music industry is in 2019. Nothing seems certain. Hopefully Pledge will right the ship, and any musicians who are owed money receive their funds soon. In episode 5 you’ll hear about other issues that Pledge faced in 2018, but the news that broke in January 2019 is different. I encourage you to look it up, but not now of course, because you’ve got a podcast to listen to! Take it away, Dutch!

Dutch ReBelle: I’ve always been an independent artist, I’ve never been signed to anybody. There was a time where I almost did, but I didn’t, thank goodness. Everything’s been completely in-house, at minimum, I should actually say at maximum, my team is probably like two-to-three people, if anybody.”

Pat Healy: That’s Boston rapper Dutch ReBelle, telling me about independence. That snippet of conversation is from the first time we spoke. The second time we speak we’re at Salon Hairapy, which, as you can tell by the name, is a hair salon. It’s where she works during the day.

She’s not quite able to fully support herself with her music career yet, so she manages the place, acts as a receptionist, and more.

Dutch ReBelle:  I kind of handle all the operational stuff. I do everything, but hair, is the easiest way to explain that.

Pat Healy: One thing to know about Dutch ReBelle: she is an independent artist with a solo career, but there’s something about her personality that inspires people around her to help her out. Even her campaign was about inviting fans to “be a part of the experience.”

Dutch ReBelle: It’s not just about Dutch ReBelle, it’s about anybody who speaks this language.”

Pat Healy: The employees at Salon Hairapy also do her hair and makeup for photoshoots and appearances.

The next time I speak with her—I’m back at Salon Hairapy, because as you might remember from last episode.

Dutch ReBelle: They had their hawkeye on you the whole time, actually. As soon as you left, they’re like ‘He’s leaving?! Wait, he’s not getting highlights?! Or a haircut or something?’

Pat Healy: I took their advice and got a haircut– and, something clicks during our conversation. I notice her mentioning something  she refers to as “hit squad” quite a few times. And I think back to other times I’ve heard her say this phrase…

Dutch ReBelle: Hit Squad
Hit Squad
Hit Squad
Hit Squad
The Hit Squad
Hit Squad

Pat Healy: At first I thought it was just a name she gave to her street team. I imagined something like a hip-hop version of the Power Rangers, hanging up flyers for shows in public places under the cover of darkness.

But it was more than that: It was independence with assistance, and you’ll hear more about that in a minute. But THAT could be what separates successful crowdfunding campaigns from unsuccessful ones.

Music Cue: “Light and Sound” by Emily Keener

Who on this podcast is going it alone? Who has a little help from their friends? Can anybody truly succeed on their own? You’re about to find out.

My name is Pat Healy, and this is The Roaring Crowdfund!: a five-part podcast from Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music, we’ll examine four very different musical acts, and follow  their progress across various crowdfunding platforms. And I’ve found some amazing acts that we’ll follow: A singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter,

Emily Keener: Hello. I’m Emily Keener

Pat Healy:A hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo

Stono Echo: Hey, this is Paten Locke, and Jay Myztroh, and we are Stono Echo!

Pat Healy: A rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic

Johnny Chops: Howdy. I’m Johnny Chops.

Pat Healy: And a rapper from Boston on Kickstarter

Dutch ReBelle: Yup, yup, yup, yow. I’m Dutch ReBelle.

Pat Healy: All of our artists are now in the final stretch! Will they reach their goals?!

Okay, so who exactly is this hit squad that Dutch ReBelle is talking about, and how involved in the campaign are they?

Dutch ReBelle: Hit squad is a part of SapientRazorfish is the actual company, but there’s a couple of them who did freelance work, so it was a clique of them. They reached out, and were like, ‘We want to work with you.’

Pat Healy: So SapientRazorfish is a digital marketing agency with an office in Boston that runs an in-house division called Hit Squad, where they take on pro-bono work, as a way of giving back to the local community, and it helps younger employees at the agency get experience and build a portfolio. Dutch ReBelle says if it weren’t for Hit Squad, she probably wouldn’t even be DOING a crowdfunding campaign.

Dutch ReBelle: They brought the Kickstarter to me, it wasn’t like I was like … they were like, “This is what we’re doing.” And I’m like, “Eh.” But then we started talking about rewards and examples, and then it was like, “Nah. This is all the difference.” This was absolutely not ’give me money’. That’s not what this is. This is a partnership. Because … you know, I’m Haitian, man. We don’t … I can’t ask anybody for money. And that’s … no, I can’t ask someone for money, because this is what … how I felt about it is, it’s my business, it’s a passion I  chose to pursue, you know what I mean? It’s like, this is something that I’m trying to do, it’s my business, it’s kind of up to me to show people what my value is by earning it. So I wasn’t really for it, but the thing is, the reward part is what completely changes everything for me, and that was the major difference as to why.

Pat Healy: Nate DeLong is a former SapientRazorfish employee. He’s the one who formed Hit Squad and convinced Dutch ReBelle to let them help her start a crowdfunding campaign. He recently opened his own agency called Operator. Back when he was working with a Boston label, they gave Hit Squad a group of artists that they wanted album covers designed for. Dutch ReBelle was one of those artists, but Nate DeLong said he had bigger plans in mind for her.

Nathan Delong: I already knew who she was and I said, “No.” I had a vision that I wanted her to do a Kickstarter and I slowly convinced her. Thanks Dutch for going along with me. [laughter] She’s like super talented, she’s the full package, she’s very professional. I think everyone can see that except for her sometimes and she felt bad for asking. But it was like, “if people aren’t gonna support Dutch ReBelle’s project, then who the fuck are they gonna support?” We had a team of people that loved her music, that were so hungry to make assets for her, for that genre. So we started to sell the idea to her and she said, “I only want to do it if I can be interactive. If I can do something with my fans.” So instead of just, “you get a T-shirt,” you can book a show or she’ll do a feature, we’ll do stuff like that, we had beat battle and stuff like that where people who were in the community, who were in the industry, and her fans could get into it and once we got aligned there, we made it a really interactive thing. We hit that ground running really hard and everyone just went crazy for months to get it done.

Pat Healy: Alright, there’s two really important things to note here. 1) Hit Squad planned for several months before Dutch ReBelle even launched her campaign and  2) Hit Squad and Dutch ReBelle were mindful of how to interact with fans throughout the entire campaign.

Pat Healy: John Trigonis, campaign strategist for film and music at Indiegogo, says this kind of due diligence isn’t the norm— and lack of research is what sinks most unsuccessful campaigns.

John Trigonis: People just aren’t educating themselves about crowdfunding and where it stands today. They’re just launching because they see that, “Hey, this person can raise 200k, so can I.” Do a little research. You’re going to find out why they were able to raise $200,000.

Pat Healy: And the reason why has a lot to do with engagement. You have to keep giving something for your audience to chew on. You can’t just launch a 30-day crowdfunding campaign and let it run on autopilot. Make as many updates as you can, without spamming people, of course. So Hit Squad and Dutch ReBelle spent the next few months filming videos to release at strategic points in the campaign, and crafting ways of updating fans throughout the 30 days.

Nathan Delong: We identified who her fans were and what they respond to and then we realized that most of her engagement came through Instagram. She had just come back from Africa at the time with all this phone footage. We did an interview and made a documentary for it. Pretty much any opportunity, we had to get content, to design assets that she could release on Instagram, or do nine-tile Instagram campaign stuff, anything that would get people in. And then the link was in the bio that drove to the Kickstarter page. But I have to make a note here that Dutch was like practically a political candidate during this time. She’s like running for mayor and her outreach, emails, and follow-ups and all the people that supported her, it was very community, very grassroots. And we just went hard to build buzz. So we got as many radio interviews as we could do, any blogs or podcasts or anything.

Pat Healy: Getting exposure for your crowdfunding campaign is key. Johnny Chops—the Austin, Texas-based rocker whose campaign we’re following—had filmed a music video for his song “Believer” in the beginning of his campaign. This is different from the intro video we talked about in episode 1, by the way. It’s a music video for one of the songs that will be on the album that he’ll put out if his campaign is successful.

When he had finished the music video for “Believer,” Johnny gave “exclusive premiere rights” to a country music website called TheBoot.com. In addition to the video embed, the write-up chronicles Johnny’s crowdfunding and features interesting background on the venue where the video was filmed.

Writer Amy McCarthy says in the article, “For frontman Johnny “Chops” Richardson, ‘Believer’ is part of a new chapter for his solo sound.” So, an article about your crowdfunding campaign and your video featured on a popular country music website is good exposure. How did that happen for Johnny? Did he just send the journalist a message asking her to cover him? No, he had a little outside help.

Johnny Chops: I kind of had to work it. I have a guy that’s working with me doing some PR and it’s this really small independent PR firm that’s gonna kinda help with the rollout of the record but I did have to pay for that.

Pat Healy: Figuring out how many people to bring in to help is a tricky dance—you’re basically paying money to people who will help you raise money!—so you’re really gambling a little bit here, as Johnny learned when he was coming up with the concept for the “Believer” video.

Johnny Chops: I really wrestled with it, I probably wrote about four or five different drafts for the idea, and I kept having to pare it down, and pare it down because you start out and you think, “Alright, I’m gonna … And it’s gonna be a bank robbery, and we’re gonna have this and this happening.” Then, you realize like, “Oh, that’s gonna take like 40 people and you’re gonna have to get them all to commit, and do it on on volunteer basis.” So, it slowly, slowly, slowly had to sort of pare the concept down to where it’s basically just me in an empty town sort of walking around.

Pat Healy: His brother helped him edit the video, but post-production was all Johnny. And that made it a little challenging to keep updating fans throughout the campaign, because Johnny was spending so much time on this one music video …  which was supposed to serve as an update itself!

Johnny Chops: I have slacked off on that a little bit. I did one update, but I’m planning a few for this week.

Pat Healy: Johnny may not have had the time, but he does realize the value in updating his fans.

Johnny Chops: I think that people respond better when they feel like they’re helping the process along. I think it just comes right back to including people and sort of growing your own community around your music. I think people wanna feel like, I know I do, they’re part of something, and there are people out there who maybe don’t know how to play music or they don’t know how to write or sing or whatever and they wanna be … but they’re still … they wanna be a part of the process. And they wanna be let in on some of the things that happen when it’s made behind the scenes.

Pat Healy: But here’s the thing, making updates while editing a video is hard, but it’s also a challenge to update your fans while you’re actually recording the album.  

Johnny Chops: Well, I’m going to try the next update I have. It was going to go out this week.  I’m going to make it public on the site to where anyone can see it rather than it’d be only for Pledge and people who have pledged the campaign. I’m kinda hoping that that might … It’s kind of an offering. It will be a short little interview with myself and the producer and then, it will be a video of the song playing from Pro Tools … It’s kind of a studio look-in. Our actual recording process went by really fast and we cut most of the tunes in like three days. That was really fast which I would say is kind of a difficult hurdle to overcome when you’re making a record and trying to crowdfund it at the same time. It’s a lot to handle. You’re in the studio and you’re trying to be in the moment, you’re trying to capture something and then it’s kind of tough to go. “Okay, can everybody stop and redo that so we can get that on video” or, “So I can make an Instagram post about it?” That’s a challenge, for sure.

Pat Healy: At this point, Johnny has finished recording his album, but he’s still working on post-production; sequencing, mixing songs, etc. Making fans feel like they’re part of a project in progress is great, but as we saw from how busy Johnny is, it does have its limitations.

On the other hand, Stono Echo—the hip-hop duo from Jacksonville we’re following—they’re all done with THEIR album! They even had copies of the album on vinyl in their intro video. Remember?  

Keep in mind that Stono Echo are doing a flexible campaign, not an all-or-nothing campaign.

With an all-or-nothing campaign—like Dutch ReBelle, Johnny Chops and Emily Keener are doing—it’s a gamble whether or not you’ll have to fulfill rewards, because even if a backer pledges $1,000, if you don’t make your goal, that backer won’t have to pay a dime, and you won’t have to send out any sort of product. But with Stono Echo’s flexible goal, they know they’ll be sending out merch either way, so they’re fulfilling these rewards almost as soon as the pledges come in. And the mailing was one area where they figured they could use some help. Here’s Paten Locke:

Paten Locke: The actual mailing of the product has been going through our management, our manager, and I know that people have received things … As far as I know Doug’s been very on with the mailing.

Pat Healy: But Stono Echo’s manager, Doug Murdoch isn’t the only one helping out with the campaign.

Paten Locke:  For this project we had a publicist do some work for us.

Pat Healy: The publicist worked the media, while the manager sent copies out for review. Here’s Jay Myztroh:

Jay Myztroh: This is our first project to have that campaign to get behind, it really gave us something to promote. Gave us a way to present the music and people did attach to it,

Pat Healy: A site called Albumism.com bit! Reviewer Jesse Ducker wrote, “Their debut album, Black Diamonds is both a rousing call to action and thoughtful reflection on the American experience as a person of color. From the rugged blue collar anthem, ‘Workin’ to the interstellar introspective, ‘Outer Limits,’ Black Diamonds is as socially aware as it is spiritual and is deeply rooted in the past, present, and future. You could best classify the sound of Stono Echo as cosmic soul.” Here’s Myztroh again:

Jay Myztroh: It was a really positive review. We’re grateful for that. I think some of that might have had just a little bit of a boost, just something for us to stay talking about it and it not be rehashing the same things like, “Okay we’re on Indiegogo, we have this, we’re offering these packages.” It’s like we kept having new things to talk about.

Pat Healy: Emily Keener—the singer-songwriter from Cleveland that we’re following—hasn’t seen much publicity for her campaign. But she has been quietly and steadily receiving support from her fans. That’s because she’s been quietly and steadily providing updates for those fans. A little bit each day …

Emily Keener: I would say on average about an hour every day queueing up social media posts, making backer updates and just generally thinking about the project and what I can do to elevate it and get it to where it needed to be. Honestly, I didn’t really spam people with my posts. I really tried hard to kind of sit back and resist the urge to over expose it. Which was a little bit tricky, when you’ve got a short amount of time to work with you wanna get as much content out there as you can, but I tried to scale it back and do one post a day. That seems like a pretty good balance. It gave people a chance to be reminded of it, but it didn’t annoy people. I think that was probably a helpful thing. It wasn’t an excessive about of time.

Pat Healy: It’s also worth noting that she’s doing it all by herself. Johnny Chops is working with a publicist. Dutch ReBelle has Hit Squad, and Stono Echo have a publicist and a manager!

Emily Keener: Yeah, I don’t have a manager. I’ve been doing all of this pretty much on my own. I know that I can do it, but if I found somebody someday that was a really good fit for what I’m doing and somebody that believed in me and I believed in them and there was a good teamwork thing going on where I didn’t necessarily feel like … Some management companies definitely take on a lot of artists, so it can have an impersonal feeling. If I found somebody that was a little bit more personalized and I felt fit with what I’m doing, I think I would probably really look into the opportunity and take it seriously because having somebody to take the time and work on stuff like this and elevate what I’m doing as an artist while I get some more time to focus on my art and rehearsing and practicing and recording, and what I really love to do, that would be awesome. It’s good to know that I can handle the business aspect of being a musician, but it’s not my forte and it’s not my passion. So, if I ever get the chance to have more time for more songwriting and less planning and strategizing, that would be awesome, but I think planning and strategizing will always be part of my job in some fashion.

Pat Healy: Jim Horan, author of Berklee Online’s Artist Management course, which is part of the Music Business master’s program, thinks Emily has serious talent, but she should seriously consider handing off some of those planning and strategizing duties.

Jim Horan: There’s no question; there’s a reason she was on The Voice, but she needs help. She needs a manager.

Pat Healy: Mike King teaches The Business of Music Marketing course for Berklee Online, which is also part of the Music Business master’s program. He says it is possible to do everything without assistance, but you really need to have the right personality for it.

Mike King: I tend to like the idea of, if you’re serious about this, and you have it in your background and your predisposition is, hey I can do some marketing. I’m ready to work, and you know, the best examples are people that have some technical experience or some other things that they can add into it. I do like the idea of I’m gonna work hard, touring, building up a base, focusing on acquisition of permission-based contacts. And it’s 2018 now that we’re speaking, email, I’m telling you, it is still a serious thing, you know? And you can convert at a really high level, higher level than anything else which is more passive, in many ways. So if you have these email addresses, and you build up your own thing and you build up a website, and you build up a following, and people are interested in what you’re doing, I think the level of partnership could be different, right? So, you could work with a third-party e-commerce partner that will charge you less than somebody like Kickstarter or Pledge Music, but unless you are a developer and you build your own PayPal or whatever thing, or integrate PayPal in, you are always gonna need help somewhere, right? I think you can do it on your own, but my caution would be, be sure you’re at the point where, you’re ready to, or you’re gonna be really disappointed.

Pat Healy: If anything though, the experience of managing her own career is bringing Emily closer to her fans.

Emily Keener: It’s the age of the DIY musician, and because you can do everything on your own, you’re kind of expected to for a little bit until you can make yourself valuable enough to be worth it to a label or a talent agency or a management company or whatever you’re shooting for. It’s an odd shift, and I feel like it affects things in certain ways, but I feel like it also gets you closer to your fan base and people who want to hear your music. I still play shows where I can walk off the stage and talk to people and many people do, too. That’s a good feeling. I don’t know that I ever want to lose that.

Pat Healy: But Emily wouldn’t necessarily have to lose that. Instead of a manager, she could hire somebody like Angela Webber. Hold up, who’s Angela Webber?

Angela Webber: I am Angela Webber, I am a independent musician in the Doubleclicks and a Kickstarter consultant.

Pat Healy: We’ll get to the whole “Kickstarter consultant” thing in a minute, but first, The Doubleclicks is a duo she created with her sister that she defines as …

Angela Webber: weird like nerdy kind of political, kind of kids’ music. It’s got a cello, it’s got a keyboard that meows. It’s just weird and it doesn’t necessarily lend itself well to being featured on Pitchfork, or opening for, whatever, Vampire Weekend, or whatever.

Pat Healy: The Doubleclicks’ music may not lend itself to those indie triumphs, but it does lend itself to devout backers. Their first Kickstarter campaign enabled the sisters to forego day jobs in 2014 when about 2,000 backers pledged $80,000 to make the Doubleclicks’ first album. A year later they raised $55,000, and two years later they raised $72,000. So yeah, Angela definitely has some experience with successful online crowdfunding campaigns. And for $50 per hour, musicians can employ her. She is one of about 20 officially-endorsed Kickstarter consultants.

Angela Webber: Cuz there’s a lot of spam and like scam consultants and marketing people that message you. As soon as you launch a Kickstarter, you’ll get dozens of emails like, “Oh, we can help you with your campaign, give us money, and we’ll buy Facebook ads for you or whatever.” So they put together a system of people that they actually interviewed and got like credentials from, and they checked references and everything. So I’m part of that program. And I’ve helped like 12 different musicians from different genres around the country with their campaigns, which has been very fun.

Pat Healy: So because the Doubleclicks make music that’s … how did Angela refer to it again?

Angela Webber: Weird, like nerdy kind of political, kind of kids’ music.

Pat Healy: Right! So because they make weird, like nerdy, kind of political, kind of kids music, they have experience reaching a niche market, which is, hello, the type of market that thrives on online music crowdfunding platforms.

Angela Webber: Like we really don’t fit well enough into a box that we can get like the manager and a label and stuff, in a way that would help us. We’d have to change what we do. And a lot of the bands that we help are like that. And that’s why Kickstarter is so great for them, because you don’t need to get through a gatekeeper to become like the middle class musician, to become sustainable as a band, and have a following, which is awesome.

Pat Healy: Now it’s time for the financial check-in, which is usually the part where I feel like a strict parent, giving their kid a hassle for a B+ … “Hey! B+? Why wasn’t it an A?” Here’s an exchange with Jay Myztroh of Stono Echo, who have only four days left in their campaign …

So with this amount, I’m just looking at the page right now. How much did this offset the costs?

Jay Myztroh: Quite a bit.

Pat Healy: Yeah?

Jay Myztroh: Yeah, indeed. Just with what it cost to just put out an album, just a certain number. We got $300, so it definitely put a nice dent for us.

Pat Healy: And here I am checking in with Johnny Chops, who the last time we spoke was at 37 percent of his goal, with two weeks to go, and now he’s all the way up to 76 percent, but wait, with 29 days to go? How could this be possible?

Johnny Chops: [Laughter] So, umm, we decided to extend our deadline. Which Pledge was totally cool with, they said they do that all the time. and I brought the goal down. I don’t know if they do that for everyone, I kinda got the impression that they did. That if you’re not getting close to your goal or it doesn’t look like you’re going to make it, I think that they’re pretty good about … They want you to get something out of it. In fact when we set the campaign up they had mentioned that it was fairly common practice. That if it looked like you were getting pretty close to the end and you weren’t gonna make it, if you wanted to, they would be willing to lower the goal for you. We went down to $2,500, which is … And it was … It was at 5, which is probably ambitious, honestly. When I started I think they do a lot of their estimation on your social numbers and your email marketing lists. And that’s actually about where they suggested I target it at. So, they were really, really close on their estimate actually.

Pat Healy: PledgeMusic let him lower the amount, and extend the campaign another 30 days, which is an option they often offer in these instances, possibly to be accommodating, and possibly because they only make a percentage of the earnings if the artists make their goals.

So, will that $2,500, half the amount Johnny was originally asking for, will that still offset the cost in a major way?  

Johnny Chops: Yeah, it’ll definitely help, it’ll definitely help. I’ll still have some other costs that I’ll have to eat but it’ll help a lot.

Pat Healy: Yup. There it is, Pat Healy the “practical dad” of music. But what about the article on TheBoot.com? Didn’t that feature help drive the numbers up enough so that Johnny could rope in $5k in two weeks?

Johnny Chops: It did a little bit but I didn’t really get what I was hoping for. I got a lot of looks at the video and some traffic on social media but I didn’t really see it translate into people going to the Pledge site really, unfortunately.

Pat Healy: But how about the email list of Randy Rogers, the act that Johnny plays bass for who nets millions of streams? I asked Johnny about that. I mean, of course, I did! I’m the “practical dad” of music! I asked if he and Randy talked about putting out the word to Randy’s fans?  

Johnny Chops: We have. I will occasionally ask for a share on our Facebook, on the Randy Rogers Band Facebook page and I’d get that occasionally. We have a team that does that so I just can drop them an email and say, “Hey, can you guys share this poster” or whatever. They’re pretty good about it but I try not to abuse it too much.

Pat Healy: I had to suppress my “Practical Dad of Music” instinct and bite my tongue. I really wanted to encourage Johnny to get Randy to let him use his connections more! But I’ve been there before, it’s a delicate balance … you certainly don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, but you do want to make some food for other people as well , and you have dreams of someday opening your own restaurant, and maybe getting some customers from the original restaurant to join you. I mean, nobody goes out to eat at the same place every single night. Sorry. Practical Dad of Music is not exactly Practical Dad of Analogies.

How about Emily Keener, how’s she doing? She has only two days left in her 30-day campaign, and only $600 to go.

Emily Keener: I’m feeling pretty great. It kind of went by really quickly, so it’s kind of weird to be in the last stretch here, but a lot of support has been shown over the last few days and there’s just been a steady stream of backers and people that are excited about the project, so that’s been heartening and I think we’re gonna get there.

Pat Healy: Last time I talked to Dutch ReBelle, she was a third of the way to her $15,000 goal with a week left. Now she has 23 hours to go! In between our conversations, she has managed to  raise $7,000, and her project is 84 percent funded! Twenty-three hours people.

Dutch ReBelle: A lot of people are like, “Congratulations,” and I’m like, “Oh, no, no no, no, no no,” that’s not how it works!”

Pat Healy: Another development for Dutch ReBelle: Kickstarter featured her as a “Project We Love,” which is a designation that Kickstarter bestows upon projects that are generating the most excitement. Let’s have our voice actress tell you what the text on Kickstarter’s site says about this!

Andrea Taylor: Projects We Love are featured by a team that works to surface extra-bright projects. They’re not paid endorsements, and like any other project, they retain complete creative independence. Most simply, a Project We Love badge is a show of respect and enthusiasm from us at Kickstarter.

Dutch ReBelle: Once you pass that 60 percent mark, you pop up on a lot of radars.

Pat Healy: Right! Once you get over the 60 percent mark, chances that you’ll make your goal increase exponentially. Kickstarter estimates that 49.55 percent of music projects make their goal — only about half the campaigns!

Of the other half that fail, not many make it to the 60 percent mark.  So reaching that mark is a really good sign, but when you’re dealing with a number like $15,000, like Dutch ReBelle is, there’s still a long way to go!

So will Dutch ReBelle raise that final $2,400? Will Emily Keener raise the last $800? Johnny Chops the last $2,100? Stono Echo the final $2,500? They’ve all been toiling away, blood, sweat, tears, updates, borrowed mailing lists, etc. Will it all pay off? Find out in the final episode of the Roaring Crowdfund!

As always, I encourage you to look up these musicians to check out their music, but their crowdfunding campaigns are all over, so I advise you not to peek at those pages until after you’ve listened to this whole series, which, by the way, concludes next week!

Just a quick note, since we’ve wrapped recording on this podcast, one of our experts has come out as a trans/non-binary person, and changed their name from Angela to Lazer. Lazer’s pronouns are they, them, and their, and they told me they were cool with making this announcement this way. Thank you, Lazer!

CREDITS: The Roaring Crowdfund was made possible by Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. Today’s podcast was written and produced by me Pat Healy, edited, mixed and mastered  by Joel Thibodeau at Spake. Additional editing by Andrew Walls. Special thanks to Gabriel Ryfer Cohen, Cristina Daura, who designed the graphics, Tim Scholl who made the website look so good, Andrea Taylor, the voice over actress.

For additional assets like photos, videos, a handy crowdfunding spreadsheet, and links to specific tracks used in this episode,  visit the episode page at theroaringcrowdfund.com, and check us out at online.berklee.edu as well. The Roaring Crowdfund concludes next week!

THE ROARING CROWDFUND EPISODE 5: The Future of Online Music Crowdfunding

Note: Transcripts of episodes for The Roaring Crowdfund are generated using a combination of a pre-written script (and occasional improvisation) for narration and a transcription service for interviews. Since this material is meant to be listened to, we highly encourage you to experience it that way. If you are quoting any portions of this episode, please check the corresponding audio.

Pat Healy: My name is Pat Healy, and this is The Roaring Crowdfund!: a five-part podcast series from Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music. We’re tracking four very different musical acts, and charting their progress across various crowdfunding platforms. Who will make their goals?

Will it be the singer/songwriter from Cleveland on Kickstarter?

Emily Keener: Hello. I’m Emily Keener.

Pat Healy: Maybe the hip-hop duo from Jacksonville on Indiegogo?

Stono Echo: Hey, this is Paten Locke, and Jay Myztroh, and we’re Stono Echo!

Pat Healy: Could it be the rocker from Austin on PledgeMusic?

Johnny Chops: Howdy. I’m Johnny Chops.

Pat Healy: Or the rapper from Boston on Kickstarter?

Dutch ReBelle: Yup, yup, yow. I’m Dutch ReBelle.

Pat Healy: This is what it all comes down to! STAY TUNED!

Did you like how I framed it like only one of them can make their goal? Well, that’s not necessarily the case, but it does ratchet up the suspense a few notches, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure we even need to ratchet up the suspense, because this is it! We are going to see if our artists made their goals or not. So … Let’s look at where they were when we last left off with them, and flash back to the end of last episode!

Johnny Chops extended his campaign and recalibrated his goal, so he has 14 days left to raise $600. Stono Echo has four days to raise $2,500! Emily Keener has two days left to raise $600. And Dutch ReBelle? She has a mere 23 hours to raise $2,400 to make her $15,000 goal!

Let’s start with her. Boston rapper Dutch ReBelle. Did she make her goal?  

Damn, right, she did!

Pledges poured in for her Kickstarter campaign during the final hours, and with less than two hours left to go, the pledges came through to bring her across the finish line … And then the pledges kept coming! She ended up raising $15,417. 198 backers! Did this campaign bring them closer?

Dutch ReBelle: Absolutely! Cuz those are my family now, all 198 backers.

Pat Healy: There were times when Dutch ReBelle wasn’t sure she’d be able to get all of this “family” together though. In the first week she raised about $2,000, in the second week it was only $200, in the third week it was up to $2,000 again, but with quite a way to go.

Dutch ReBelle: The last week was literally $9,000 or $10,000. All the last week. Probably $3,000, $4,000 was in the last three days. It’s crazy, we did it! It’s amazing. Because it’s one thing to hit it, it’s another thing to go over the goal, and I’m relieved because, honestly, I was working for that. It’s really like a political campaign. I was really just like, “Here, this is what I’m about. Please help me.” But people were so much more into it than I thought. That last day, it was crazy. People were texting me like,“I can’t breathe.”

Pat Healy: That’s right. People were texting her! Her fans! She uses a mobile phone product called Superphone. She sends and receives direct text messages from fans, but it’s a different number than her personal line, and she checks Superphone messages the way you would an email inbox, so she’s not blowing up every single time somebody reaches out to her. Basically, if you text Dutch ReBelle at 4 a.m., you won’t wake her up. So the fans who subscribe to Dutch’s superphone receive messages just like a regular text, which creates an intimacy between the artist and fan that seems just about right for an age where the wall of rockstar mystery has broken down, 140 characters at a time, where artists are appealing directly to fans for money to make music.

Music Cue: “Meant for Me” by Dutch ReBelle

Pat Healy: One of the people who was texting directly back-and-forth with Dutch ReBelle was Nate DeLong, head of Hit Squad, the pro-bono marketing team who convinced her to do Kickstarter in the first place. Because, really, if her campaign fails, that does not look like a “hit” for Hit Squad!

Nathan Delong: And then on the last day, I was watching it climb up towards the goal, I was texting back and forth with Dutch and we just hit it, then we passed it and it was crazy. I knew we were gonna do it. But it was a battle, man, it was a slug-fest, 100 percent!

Pat Healy: Okay, so let’s take you to Dutch ReBelle, after the slug-fest, one month after her campaign has ended, and she has already spent all fifteen thousand dollars—that’s all the money she earned—on what? On beats from producers, recording sessions, food to eat at the recording sessions, and photo shoots.

Dutch ReBelle: I don’t spend money on myself, you know what I mean? t makes no sense, but honestly, all it did was some studio sessions where maybe I wouldn’t have ate, I got to eat. Or maybe certain photo shoots where it was just two looks, and now maybe it’s three or four, and realistically a photo shoot, if you understand, it’s not even about being cute. It’s marketing, it’s content. Shows come up, they need pictures, they need updated images, to fit their own marketing angles. If I only have one photo shoot, and I’m doing a school show at a high school, I can’t use the one where I’m in the fishnet with the … you know what I mean?

Pat Healy: She’s already fulfilled some of the rewards too. A promoter named Justice pledged $500 to host her as a headliner for a local hip-hop showcase in Salem, Massachusetts at a club called Opus. The perk was a win-win.

Justice: I reached out to Dutch ReBelle to see if she would be interested in performing here. We had a rapport before about her performing at Opus and around this time that I reached out to her, she said she had the campaign going, so I thought it was really cool that we were able to incorporate the booking into the campaign, just to push that in the public sphere. A lot of people were supporting that for their different reasons, and I wanted to support to get her out here to Opus.

Pat Healy: That audio clip is a little shaky, because we’re outside of the club, and both eager to get back in to listen to Dutch ReBelle live. Actually, you’ll probably want to hear a little bit of that too …

Music Cue: “I Can’t” (Live) by Dutch ReBelle

Backers bought other rewards that Dutch ReBelle has yet to fulfill, but that she’s really excited about. One in particular, the “feature experience,” is where a backer pays to have Dutch ReBelle guest on their recording. This was purchased for $250 by a producer who bought it for a young artist he’s working with.

Dutch ReBelle: She’s younger, and she’s coming up, so he’s like, “I’m working on the right record.” And I’m like, “This is a great use of this reward. This is exactly what the point was.” So now, for example, they use my platform to help another artist. That’s awesome.

Pat Healy: And the circle shall remain unbroken! Congrats to Dutch ReBelle, and to the young artist who will have Dutch ReBelle featured on her recording, eventually!

Alright, now it’s time to see if Stono Echo made their goal!

When I reach the members of Stono Echo, the hip-hop duo from Jacksonville, they’re in good spirits. They aimed to raise $4,000 to make their latest record. The ticker on the duo’s Indiegogo page shows that with 32 backers they raised …

$1,355, only 34 percent of their goal.

They didn’t make it.

But when I talk to them, they say that they have actually achieved their goal, it’s just not the financial one that they put out to the world. Here’s Paten Locke.

Stono Echo: As far as the goal, I think there’s a little bit of strategy involved in that, but that goal was set up definitely considerably higher than what our actual goal was. The goal is to get as many people to get into it and get it in a presale as possible, so by the time we release it to our distributor we already have sales under our belt. But, more importantly, I think that the much easier-to-attain goal that we attained was pretty much to pay for the manufacturing of the record itself, of the physical vinyl. I believe we made just about that back in presale orders through the campaign, to pay for the entire press of vinyl. We had a goal that was sort of, we’d love it if we could this many people to a presale … we’d have some money and we’d feel good about ourselves, but then below that there’s a sort of goal that’s sort of the real reason why we do it, which is a presale to cover the cost of manufacturing basically.

Music Cue: “Workin” by Stono Echo

Pat Healy: I’m reminded of a line from one of Stono Echo’s songs, “Workin’” …  

So that line there, “there came a day my rate of pay took backseat to my goals,” that really says it all. These dudes are in it for the love, not the money.

Myztroh: You’re absolutely right. There was, “there came a day my rate of pay took backseat to my goals,” and that’s … this is that time of my life where really that first foot forward is really the art and just being creative and feeling like I have to get these things out, so my time needs to be occupied with that.

Paten: I feel like, I just feel like they’re two different things, there’s music and there’s business. I just make music to make great music, to make music that I like. Then beyond that, it is my career so I want it to do well, but that’s like a separate thing. And I just feel like you’ve got to make the music you want to make first and foremost to even consider going to the next step of the business of it.

Myztroh: Financial payoff is really the icing on the cake to someone who, I’ve been loving music my entire life. It’s more a dream to have a record, actual record that I can put under a needle, that’s the goal in itself. So me trying to create something that’s worthy of being on a record is more my drive and the hope is that people want to hear it. Then, whatever comes after that. You know?

Paten: I just have always felt like making something good is just what matters at the end of the day. This is the experience of music and there are people out there who are going to find it

Pat Healy: Several times throughout these five episodes I’ve pointed out that Stono Echo’s campaign was a flexible goal, meaning that they could keep whatever their backers pledged to them. But how about the all-or-nothing goal, which all of the other artists we’ve been following have. What if they didn’t meet that goal? Would they still make their albums?

Here’s Dutch ReBelle …

Dutch ReBelle: Oh, hell yeah.

Pat Healy: And we already know how that turned out for her.

How about Emily Keener, if she doesn’t make her goal, will she still release the album anyway?

Emily Keener: Well, I would work something out. Because, above all else, I think there’s an importance to releasing the music and making sure that I get it out into world. It might take a little bit longer and it might be a little bit more difficult, but if that were to happen, the show must go on right?

Pat Healy: The show must go on indeed, so here’s Johnny Chops, answering the same question: If he doesn’t reach his goal, will he still make his album?

Johnny Chops: Yeah, yeah, I’m still gonna make the record, regardless. So I’m a little nervous about not making an impact on anything. Anytime you put yourself on the line you have anxiety about that in any way.

Pat Healy: Okay, so who should I reveal next? At this point, both Johnny and Emily have only $600 left to raise. Will they each be able to make their album with the support from their fans, or will they have to finance it themselves? Let’s choose which one we’re gonna reveal at random . .

Okay, so it’s Emily Keener that we’ll hear from first. Did she do it?

Oh, she did it! She raised $9,999 in 30 days. 147 backers! How do you feel, Emily?

Emily Keener: I feel great. The project was a really big success, not only because we funded the entire thing, but just because it got people so excited about the new record that I’m creating, so I’m really grateful and happy to have it done.

Pat Healy: So at the end of this successful campaign, what’s Emily’s biggest takeaway?

Emily Keener: I think it was reaffirmed in the fact that the people around me care about what I’m doing and are willing to invest in it. Just having people around you that think that your work is important enough to spend their time and their money supporting, it’s really special, and it makes creating the work even easier. That was definitely a confidence boost and it makes me even more excited about the record. That was a blessing. I think I learned a little bit more about how effective true connection can be as far as reaching out there with my music and not just with social media posts and promo stuff, but with actually doing live concerts on Facebook or talking about it at my shows or talking about it one on one, so when you’re connecting with someone just person-to-person and not necessarily through marketing schemes, it’s really effective because then they’re even more compelled to share it with others.

Pat Healy: As far as a nail-biting campaign, Emily’s was more one of “slow and steady winning the race.”

Emily Keener: I think when you’ve got a short amount of time to work with, you want to get as much content out there as you can. But I tried to scale it back and do one post a day, and that seems like a pretty good balance, and it gave people a chance to be reminded of it, but it didn’t annoy people, you know? I think that was probably a helpful thing. It wasn’t an excessive amount of time. The night before, it looked like it was going to happen because I did a Facebook Live performance on Facebook and … Well, obviously on Facebook. It’s Facebook Live. Those tend to be really successful in engaging people with music, specifically, just doing little mini concerts online. It got even more people excited and I had the Kickstarter link in the post itself, so that generated a ton of new donations, and by the time I went to sleep, we were like $200 away.  

Music Cue: “Light and Sound” by Emily Keener

Pat Healy: Emily was in a car by herself, driving to a gig in Montreal when she found out …

Emily Keener: And I just got the email from Kickstarter and did a little happy dance in the car, and then kept driving on my way and started to think about all the work that’s going to lie ahead as far as fulfilling the rewards and working on the record.

Pat Healy: So what about those rewards? She sold four songwriting lessons, three love songs, two charitable shows, two framed photos, one surprise concert, and one Ohio house concert. The most intense of these seems to be the three love songs. Emily has never written a song this way before, but she’s up to the task. There was a different reward that would have been a lot more difficult!

Emily Keener:  I don’t think anybody got the Romantic Mix Tape one. That one would’ve been quite a bit of work because I would’ve had to learn some songs that maybe are outside of my comfort zone or style, and I would’ve had to record them all and produce them and get them on a CD. I’m probably most relieved that nobody really picked up on that one.

Pat Healy: The amount of time spent fulfilling rewards can be a real drain. It’s one of the places where Berklee Online Music Business Finance instructor Luiz Augusto Buff says artists usually end up losing out. The other places are in shipping …

Luiz Augusto Buff: Shipping costs, UPS, or post, can add up a lot, depending on to where you’re delivering your goods and your rewards. That’s one thing where the artists have to really pay attention, and maybe weigh each reward to understand the cost before pricing each tier.

Pat Healy: … and producing too much merch.  

Luiz Augusto Buff: Let’s say that one tier that you have, you’re going to send T-shirts out. Let’s say you sold 23 T-shirts on that tier, but the minimum that the manufacturer would do would be 50 T-shirts, you know? You have to really be aware of those minimum requirements of production for certain levels. Or sometimes, it’s actually more cost effective to manufacture 100 T-shirts, have the extra ones on stock for your concerts, for other things.

Pat Healy: You may remember Mike Doughty from episode 3, or you more likely remember him as the acerbically witty singer who first came to prominence in the 1990s with his band Soul Coughing, and has found a comfortable way to supplement his touring income through crowdfunding. First, through a few campaigns on PledgeMusic, and currently on Patreon, the monthly-subscriber funding platform. He says giving that personal touch can be time-consuming, but once you get in the groove, you figure out a way to make it legit personal, while also not taking up too much of your own time.  

Mike Doughty: Yeah, like I tried to make it sort of its own art piece. Gosh, I would type things out. I would do free writes on a typewriter. Type out lyrics. Play things on Skype for people. Tweet some ridiculous tweet about people, not a promotional tweet, but something that was kind of funny. I think a “tweet of absurd praise” is how it was worded. When I do it in general, I try to make it more than just,“Give me money for a thing.” I try to make it something that’s interesting as a piece of art.

Pat Healy: And all of this leads us directly to Johnny Chops, who put a lot of personal perks out to his fans (handwritten lyrics, a personalized holiday card with a signed greeting) AND put a lot of new merch up for sale (beer koozies, shirts, stickers, trucker hats, etc.). As a reminder, this was for his 60-day Pledge campaign to raise $5,000, which then towards the end of that 60-day campaign to raise $5,000 became a 90-day campaign to raise $2,500. Last we checked in with Johnny, he had two weeks left and $600 to go.  

Johnny Chops: Yeah, we had lowered the goal just to something a little bit more realistic, which was fine.

Pat Healy: So did they do it?  

Yes! Johnny Chops and the Razors made their goal in the final weeks of the campaign, raising a grand total of $2,600, a hundred bucks more than the revised all-or-nothing goal. 84 backers!

Johnny Chops: I’m feeling super thankful and super relieved. Yeah, it’s super awesome!

Pat Healy: It was the personal appeals that brought Johnny over the finish line.

Johnny Chops: I did a couple of little videos on social media that I think really helped. Super simple. It was kinda funny. I spent a lot of time and work on sort of real music video stuff with a camera crew and editing stuff in Final Cut, and that stuff is great. But I found that just speaking directly to people right into your phone, like an Instagram video, seemed to be really effective. Just connecting with people. Say, “Hey, we’re at 5 percent. We’re almost there.” If I do it again, I would plan on maybe doing a weekly, a scheduled update like that. Like, “Hey, this week we’ve got this and this is what happened.” People seem to respond to that really well. And I also think just being at the end of it and having a sense of urgency brought some people in it. Like, “We’ve got three days left,” or “we’ve got 12 hours left,” or however much you want to count it down. Having that sense of urgency, I think people go, “Oh, I’d better get on board.”

Pat Healy: And how about those perks?

Johnny Chops: Actually, nobody really went for the weird stuff. I had like, learn a cover song of your choice or acoustic house party, stuff like that. The expensive things like that, people did not go for. I don’t know if that’s just people don’t have that kind of money. Or maybe my friends don’t. My friends are not wealthy, unfortunately. But yeah, T-shirts. I actually had some artwork finally done to show off. And that made a big difference I think too, people actually seeing what they were buying. It took me awhile to get designs done. So, you know, T-shirts, hats, stickers, and koozies. And records. That was the main thing.

Pat Healy: Johnny does admit that he falls a little short by the standards Luiz Augusto Buff set forth. He may have spent more money on these perks than he earned in his whole campaign. But he doesn’t regret a thing.

Johnny Chops: I spent a lot of extra time I probably didn’t need to, like on the Christmas card. I spent two or three hours designing a little Christmas card. And you know what? Nobody bought one. I did get vinyl made. It’s … I basically paid for most of that stuff out-of-pocket ahead of time, so it’s going to reimburse me. I’m looking it at as, it almost paid for the vinyl. But I had to invest to get shirts made, I had to invest to get hats made. So, in the end, is it going to make me all my money back? No. But I think it did do what I hoped it would, in that some more people are aware of the record that maybe wouldn’t have been. We’ve got some T-shirts sold and hats. That’s actually great to have out, because that’s advertising for your band.  

Pat Healy: So there we have it, folks. Online crowdfunding for music in contemporary America.

So if that was online crowdfunding for music now, what about online crowdfunding for music in the future? 10 years from now will people say, “Remember when we got on our computers to give musicians directly, just so they could make albums?”  

Here’s John Kellogg. He’s the program director for Berklee Online’s new Master of Arts in Music Business program. Does John think that crowdfunding will continue to be a sustainable way for musicians to make money?

John Kellogg: I think it certainly could have a long lifespan. I can’t see why it wouldn’t. You also notice in crowdfunding that even the government responded and created laws for you to be able to raise more money than possible in the past. So I think you’re going to see a growth in this area, and as artists become more successful through this method, I think more artists will gravitate toward it. However, I think the major labels and publishing companies and promotion companies like Live Nation, possibly, for the artists that are more successful in that area, are going to approach them and become partners with them. So crowdfunding can also serve the purpose of giving artists that become successful more leverage in negotiating with other companies to enable them to expand their brands further.

Pat Healy: In the last episode we discussed whether artists can make it on their own during a crowdfunding campaign without management or a label. Molly Neuman, formerly of Kickstarter, currently of Songtrust, says the music industry is so upside down that it’s not just a question of whether an artist can make it without a label, but whether a label can make it work without a crowdfunding platform. She agrees with what John Kellogg says … that maybe the future involves companies teaming up with crowdfunding platforms more.

Molly Neuman: We see it somewhat in different genres, so maybe like in jazz and in classical where labels don’t have the resources. They might be small, so they don’t really have the resources for funding the production of the recording, but they’re there to market, and manufacture, and distribute. That happens a lot. I really do hope that that’s one of the options where we could be more in partnership with record companies, and that I think is a healthier way of our business operating. Because, if you imagine we know the numbers, they’re thrown at us all the time. Streaming is up 50 percent over last year, or at least in 2016 it was up more than 50 percent. That part of the business is growing. It’s a lot of people who are paying not a lot. And Kickstarter meets the needs of the people that really want to be connected, and really want to feel like they’re supporting the artist directly. They want a physical piece of that project.

Pat Healy: Let’s hear from Jayce Varden, co-founder of PledgeMusic. What does he think the next step is?

Jayce Varden: What do I think the next step is? I think that we’ve seen, now that the proof is in the numbers with streaming it’s the evolution of that product and how that product affects people’s lives and how they interact with it. There’s certainly an increased rate of speed at which people want to consume content.

I think maybe the morph is more about how the content gets distributed, you know what I mean? The concept of the album, to me, is something to watch. As I see more and more artists go to a singles-driven type of continued release. And take a look at what Jack Conte has done with Patreon and the idea of subscriptions, as to whether or not the morphing of crowdfunding goes into that. He says, “okay, every month we have this single that we want to put out,” it’s really something that’s interesting to watch.

Pat Healy: Here’s Brian Camelio, who started ArtistShare, one of the first online crowdfunding platforms for musicians.

Brian Camelio: I think that the future of all this is it’s going to be a combination of things, and it’s really going to be based on what I believe is a collection of things, and a collection of relationship-building tools that allow fans to come in over a longer period of time to feel like they’re part of the artist’s life. That’s not necessarily an all-or-nothing campaign, or a GoFundMe, or whatever. Even the Patreon thing, I really like what Patreon’s doing, but the one question that I always ask myself is, “Is it sustainable?” I really hope it is, because I like those guys. They’re great guys and they’ve got a lot of money behind them .

Pat Healy: Well, let’s get somebody from Patreon to answer a few questions!

Bremner Morris: I’m Bremner Morris, the head of Creator Partnerships and Creative Success at Patreon.

For musicians, the traditional way in which they were building and driving a successful career in music was that they would sort of build up to a singular album and produce that sort of behind the scenes. Then there would be a massive launch and off of that launch, one they would drive initial album sales then two they would use that as a way to drive in-person on tour sales for tickets and stuff like that, then also monetize through merch. Our business model sort of shifts that because we’re an ongoing membership platform for artists to get paid. So, the great thing about it is it’s an ongoing sustainable source of income. But the challenge for a lot of artists is that they have to then rethink how they engage with their fans and drive an ongoing recurring, likely on a monthly basis, engagement with those fans. Then for a musician, often that means sort of reevaluating the way they either release music or provide behind the scenes insights into what they’re doing in the studio. Or they maybe produce videos that are a build up to the album release. So it’s just a little bit of a different way of thinking about how you engage with your fans.

Pat Healy: Bremner Morris acknowledges that this way of re-thinking the traditional artist-to-fan relationship has its challenges … for both artists and fans!

Bremner Morris: So your fans are providing you value, by forking over some type of subscription dollar, and then in exchange you are having to provide value back to those fans. And that does require a ton of investment from an artist to think to themselves, “Okay, what is the thing I can offer on a recurring basis that is going to justify this subscription for my fans?” On the fan side that is a big investment on their front, they’re saying, “Look you know we really want to support you and we also want to engage with you in a different shade or manner and we want to have that exclusive relationship with you that comes with being a part of your fan club or your member base.” But they are on average spending about $7 a month on a given artist on Patreon’s platform. So, if you think about other subscriptions that people have for content, $7 for one specific artist is pretty high when you think about your Netflix subscription or your Spotify subscription, call it $10 to $15 a month. And we’ve seen that a lot of folks that are fans on Patreon’s platform or members on Patreon’s platform actually subscribe to multiple different creators.

Pat Healy: But connecting musicians and fans on a subscription basis is a worthwhile enough idea for Kickstarter to turn on the faucet for a service they call Drip, where artists can shift their model to a continuous basis, like Patreon. Does Bremner Morris see Drip as a rip-off? Or a a Drip off? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Anyway, here he is with his take on that.

Bremner Morris: We see it as actually fairly complementary, and a nice sign that the market is moving towards this ongoing sustainable source of recurring revenue for creators.

Pat Healy: Bruce Houghton, who teaches Music Marketing and Music Business Trends and Strategies for Berklee Online, says that we may see a lot of changes in the way crowdfunding is done in the future.

Bruce Houghton: Whatever form it takes, it’s part of that trend. The relationship is direct between the fan and the artist, and I just think you’re going to see new iterations of that, but that’s certainly a trend that I can’t imagine going away anytime in the foreseeable future.

Pat Healy: And that relationship definitely goes both ways. Here’s Emily Keener.

Emily Keener: Yeah, I definitely find myself looking into people as they’re backing up the project because I’m always just, I always have this sense of wonder when I’m shown support from other people, like “Wow, they really care about this, like who is this person? I should know who they are because they cared enough to take a look at this and actually believe in what I’m doing.”

Pat Healy: Remember Mark Kelly from episode 1? He’s the keyboardist for the band Marillion, who basically invented online crowdfunding for music. He appreciates the relationship between fan and musician so much that when his band recently tried doing a campaign with PledgeMusic, he felt it didn’t bring him as close to the fans as when Marillion ran the campaign directly.

Mark Kelly: We thought, “Okay, well we could outsource it. Let’s do a deal with Pledge.” We have to pay them a small percentage, but we felt it was worth it to have it taken off our hands. Again, in hindsight we realized that the personal connection between the band and the fans is important, and having a third party in the middle is not what they want. I think on balance we’ve decided that it’s probably not gonna be the way we will proceed in the future. The extra work involved is worth it for the control as well, because to be honest, a few things went wrong which were out of our control. I’m not saying it’s Pledge’s fault, I just think that the more people that are involved in the process, the more chance there is for things to slip through the cracks, you know?

Pat Healy: Pledge came under fire in June of 2018 when Variety ran an article stating that “several major artists” had told the publication that Pledge had fallen far behind in its payments. Sources for the company cited growth that was too rapid and a change in the company’s payment structure, since PayPal, which was built into Pledge’s system, ceased working with some crowdfunding companies in late 2017. The company has since seemed to correct its course and adapt to its growth.

Ted Leo, a well-established indie rocker with recent experience in this field, says that adapting really is the key to surviving and thriving in the music industry of tomorrow. Adapting and a little bit of compromise, whatever form crowdfunding takes.

Ted Leo: There are trade-offs. I guess there always will be when models change and one is attached to a previous model. I think being able to recognize the positive trade-offs is going to be a big part of how this all continues in the future.

Pat Healy: John Kellogg says now that music crowdfunding is adapting to streaming and subscription models, it probably won’t be too long until the music industry as a whole has to adapt to a new technology … which crowdfunding in turn will eventually have to adapt to.

John Kellogg: I think that the next wave is going to be the playing of music or the development of an implant in your brain that will enable you to trigger a playing of recordings or anything else just by thinking about it. “I really love that song by The Temptations from the 60s. What was it called? ‘My Girl’? Yeah, ‘My Girl.’ Play ‘My Girl.’” In my mind, it will play and I’ll be able to hear it. So,I don’t know what kind of service, who’s going to be the service company that’s going to … is that going to be the new model? Spotify? Amazon might sell these implants? They’re working on that, they really are working on that from what I saw, the ability for people to trigger things. Instead of the speaker that Amazon’s selling in all of your houses, it will be in your mind. So what kind of dynamic will that … how will that change the royalty rates and structures? What will be the compensation for that?

Pat Healy: Another facet of tomorrow’s crowdfunding campaigns is the consultants. Nathan Delong is the guy whose Hit Squad helped Dutch ReBelle raise more than $15 grand for her campaign. He’s helped a lot of people with crowdfunding. In fact, the total he has helped artists and entrepreneurs raise recently surpassed $1 million.

He saw this as such a big opportunity that he quit his job at an ad agency to open a new shop called Operator that specializes in crowdfunding. As much as he enjoyed working with Dutch ReBelle, he says he plans on specializing in other areas of crowdfunding that are decidedly NOT music.

Nathan Delong: I think crowdfunding music is hard. It’s the hardest category, I think.  It’s weird, if you make some stupid piece of technology, you turn it on and it gets 300% funded in the first day. I think maybe because it’s instantly tangible, you’re gonna get a doohickey in the mail. With music, I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of haters, a lot of haters, and I think people are slow to support something. They want to see that it’s cool first and they want to see that other people are supporting it.

Pat Healy: Kickstarter consultant Angela Webber says that no matter what changes with the places we currently do our crowdfunding, the original model of appealing directly to fans online is here to stay.

Angela Webber: Even if it’s not necessarily Kickstarter in 30 years, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, I know that platforms like with social media things are always changing, and people grow to trust or like platforms more than others. And what I have found is staying tuned in, being an active consumer is a really good idea. Also, just keep all of your fans’ email addresses, so you know how to contact them no matter how many platforms crash and burn.

Pat Healy: So Angela Webber says she wouldn’t be surprised if Kickstarter was still kicking in 30 years, that it won’t crash and burn anytime soon. So, let’s talk to somebody from Kickstarter!

Meredith Graves: My name is Meredith Graves and I’m director of music for Kickstarter

Pat Healy: You may know Meredith as the singer for Perfect Pussy, as a host on MTV, or for her writing and publishing. She’s also the future of Kickstarter. So, what does she see as the future of music crowdfunding?

Meredith Graves: Based on what I’ve seen, what we will see in the future of music crowdfunding is more people than ever reaching out to offer resources. The things that money can get you eventually, yes, but rather than raising a bunch of money to hire, you know, a person to design the cover of your album, you may find in the months and years and decades to come, that as more people get interested in participating in the development of creative work, and as more people start to say, “Hey, you know I want to participate in this. Maybe I don’t play an instrument or run a record label, but I love music and I want to be part of this,” you’ll see creators developing networks within existing crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. You’ll see a whole sub-system of resource-sharing past the level of money, where one successful creator in the arts category may find themselves reaching out to a music creator they found because they ended up on the front page of Kickstarter at the same time, to say, ‘I love your band. Can I do the cover for your next record?’ You’ll see creators running campaigns over and over and over again. We’ve seen creators who’ve had success multiple times across the platform. Increasing their financial goals slightly every time, but increasing their audience tenfold. Because what they get, in terms of support, is so much more than financial. I tend to draw this diagram of a big circle, and I say most people think the circle’s labeled money, and there’s a bunch of stuff inside that circle, right? But really the circle is labeled resources and money is one of things inside of it.

Pat Healy: What she’s describing feels like a communal artistic Utopia, of sorts, combining ancient practices like people bartering and trading at the town green. But it also sounds like something that’s beginning to happen. Think about Joel Nixon, the Canadian art student who designed the cover for Meow the Jewels (that’s the off-the-wall crowdfunding project that fans persuaded rap duo Run the Jewels to make a few years ago). He saw something exciting, and he said, “Yeah, I can lend a hand.”

And think about this podcast. I chose the 4 artists we’ve been following on the Roaring Crowdfund because their music moved me in some way, and thought about how I could lend a hand. Hopefully these five episodes will help them increase their audiences ten-fold, as Meredith Graves says, because they all have talent worthy of much wider exposure.

As I’ve said before, online crowdfunding platforms are crowded, but beneath every music crowdfunding  campaign is a story, from artists hoping to make themselves heard. Sometimes you can connect with the story through the campaign, but I was fortunate enough to also connect with every one of these artists on a deeper level, getting a window into what doesn’t necessarily make it onto their public web pages. And these are just four acts out of millions: Four acts who put themselves out there and faced their fear of failure directly just to run these campaigns. This is independent music that is dependent upon you! And these artists were generous enough to share all of this with me, and I’m happy to share it with you. They also shared some valuable thoughts that were slightly outside of the the scope of these episodes.

Here’s Johnny Chops talking about why he’s embarking on his solo endeavor, and it has nothing to do with a desire to leave the Randy Rogers Band, the band he plays bass for that has millions of streams online.

Johnny Chops: I mainly want this record just to enable me to go out and tour to some extent on my own. We’ve scaled back our tour dates a little bit now that we’ve established ourselves and we grew a little older and a lot of people in the band have families now where we’re really only touring 100 to 110 days a year so that leaves a lot of open time for me. For me, it’s really as simple as I really enjoy creating music, that’s really what makes me the happiest, and 100 days a year of that isn’t really enough.

Pat Healy: Dutch ReBelle told me about about the non-profit she runs with her family. It’s how she learned to raise money!

Dutch ReBelle: I never told you about that?! Oh man, I help run a whole nonprofit organization. We have a school in Haiti. So the organization is called KOREKTHO. It started in 2005, it’s my mom and dad, uncles; it’s my father’s hometown, basically, in Haiti, so we have a school there. We built a school there, established it, and what the organization does is we basically fund the school, so anything that we do is raising money so that the school can stay open so the kids can continue to go free.

Pat Healy: With the members of Stono Echo, we often got off topic. A typical conversation might begin at Bob Marley, go to Stevie Wonder, to Prince, and then to something like 1970s rock. We ended up in 1970s rock because I asked Stono Echo if the album title Black Diamonds had anything to do with the Kiss song of a similar title …

It didn’t. They don’t like Kiss.

Stono Echo: Kiss is garbage.

Pat Healy: Everything from artists like Della Reese and Mel Torme to the D.A.I.S.Y. age of hip-hop, where I asked if they found some sort of kinship …

Stono Echo: It’s not particularly about making positive hip-hop or positive music, it’s about really the purpose of what music is to me already. That’s already what’s gonna lead me from not putting things that aren’t truthful on music or putting things that keep people in cycles of ignorance.

Pat Healy: And with Emily Keener, we got into lengthy discussions about the value of art in modern society …

Emily Keener: Especially musicians, our work isn’t necessarily as tangible as maybe a visual artist or somebody who crafts things or works in maybe a more left-brain type job. It’s like trying to find a balance between self-promotion and actually trying to get your work out there and get people to support it, but the humility of knowing that you’re an artist and maybe some people don’t value it as much as you value it, it’s hard because it’s like I don’t want to come off sounding all egotistical by asking for money to create art, but at the same time, I have to remind myself that it’s worth it. Art is worth something, and it’s something that a lot of people think is worth supporting. I really try to not downplay that and not let my trepidation about that get in the way.

Pat Healy: And the Roaring Crowdfund certainly tries not to downplay it either. So go out there and support the musicians you know, figure out how you can lend a hand. Maybe you could be their manager, or their booking agent. And no matter what, keep going out and seeing live music. And when you’re there, come on, sign the mailing list! That’s these artists’ lifeline to their fans. It’s their lifeline to you. It’s their lifeline to their livelihood!

CREDITS: The Roaring Crowdfund was made possible by Berklee Online, the online school of Berklee College of Music.

Since we wrapped recording on this podcast, one of our experts has come out as a trans non-binary person, and changed their name from Angela to Laser. Laser’s pronouns are they, them, and their. And they told me they were cool with making this announcement this way. Thank you, Laser!

This episode was written and produced by me, Pat Healy, edited, mixed, and mastered by Joel Thibodeau at Spake. Special thanks to Andrew Walls, who was a huge help editing these soundbites, Marty Johnson, who lent additional editorial and mixing expertise to the proceedings, Gabriel Ryfer Cohen, who composed the opening theme music of this episode, Cristina Daura, who designed the graphics, Tim Scholl who made the website look so good, voiceover artist Andrea Taylor, all of the musicians and interviewees who participated in this series, and you, for listening!

I encourage you to look up our featured artists, to check out their music, and to take a look at their crowdfunding pages.

For additional assets like photos, videos, and crowdfunding success tips and spreadsheets, visit the episode page at theroaringcrowdfund.com (or just roaringcrowdfund.com), or check us out at online.berklee.edu.