Daniel Ward-Murphy is a young singer-songwriter in a very pleasant James Blunt mould, who plays on the London circuit, finishing each gig with an unusual request: visit this web page — www.sellaband.com/danielwm — and “believe”. So far 134 people, including strangers from as far away as Hong Kong, have taken him at his word, gone to his web page and “believed” by investing spare cash to a current total of $5,430. This will help Ward-Murphy on his way to a recording session with a leading producer at a top studio. Last month, one kind (or maybe mad) chap from Latvia wrote a cheque for a hefty $1,000 after listening to three tracks on Ward-Murphy’s web page. If interest continues to pick up pace, and WardMurphy’s total reaches $50,000, he gets to record his album.
Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen and Sandi Thom have all, famously, had their success associated with the low-cost long-reach of the web. But, on closer inspection, it’s not at all clear whether any of them was ever a genuine example of independent artists doing it for themselves online (the digital era’s punk aesthetic) or actually recipients of record company hype. Arctic Monkeys didn’t have a MySpace page until shortly before their debut single release; Allen was already signed by an EMI subsidiary before she joined MySpace; and Thom had a lucrative publishing deal in place by the time she began webcasting.
Ward-Murphy’s web page is different. It’s published by Sellaband — a new company bringing independent music directly to fans. Artists upload their music on to the Sellaband site and make it available for free. “Believers” support their favourite bands by buying shares (“parts”) for $10 each and getting more people to invest. The Dutch Gothic rock band Nemesea have just become the first group to reach the $50,000 required to open the recording studio doors. For their faith and dosh, believers will receive a special edition of the completed album on CD and, alongside the artists and Sellaband, share advertising revenue.
Ward-Murphy is vying for the position of the UK’s “most believed” artist with the electronica act Second Person. Ward-Murphy, however, says he isn’t worried, he’s just happy to be making progress: “Before, unless I could get certain influential people along to the gigs, I couldn’t move forward. Nine times out of ten they would cancel, and there would be another month to wait before getting any further. This way you are never standing still.”
Sellaband is the brainchild of the Dutch entrepreneur Pim Betist, and has been fine-tuned and directed by Johan Vosmeijer, a former Sony BMG executive who managed to quit the industry with his love for music intact.
“What drew me to it straight away was the shift in power towards the buying public,” he says. “Working for a record company I used to feel quite baffled by some decisions made in America — watching artists being signed or dropped. With Sellaband, I can invest money in bands and I’ll have the proof that I was the first to discover these great groups.”
Arnis — a 47-year-old entrepren- eur in Riga, and one of Sellaband’s more generous investors — is WardMurphy’s $1,000 believer. He knows he can’t be confident of a return but insists that it’s about the music, not the money: “It’s gratifying to help someone. It’s only the cost of a couple of U2 concert tickets.”
It’s lucky that Arnis deems music the priority because investors looking to Sellaband as a pop stock market may be disappointed. Online revenues from advertising are increasing fast, but not as fast as the number of socially-minded internet projects fighting over it. The founders, by contrast, are more likely to be on to a good thing: “believers” pay upfront, which presumably allows Sellaband to bank the fee and earn interest on it until, eventually, the $50,000 is reached and the CD made. If, say, 5,000 bands reach Ward-Murphy’s current modest level of investment ($5,430), that would give Sellaband $27 million from which to extract interest. Believers aren’t just banking on Sellaband, they’re banking with them. Bands should also take note: SellaBand retains the rights to all the masters for one year, with a cut of the publishing royalties in perpetuity.
Despite this kind of must-read small print, amateur angel investors are something of an online trend. The South African singer Verity has been assiduously selling a debut album that hasn’t yet debuted at www.iamverity.com. Meanwhile, the London-based singer-songwriter Jonathan Haselden made the news recently when he auctioned a line (“And when you’re lost, you’ll always be found”) from one of his unpublished, unrecorded songs for a ridiculous £11,000 on eBay. He had already been successfully selling songs to corporate investors for £1,000 a line, when unprecedented demand encouraged him to turn to the auction site. The buyer will receive 2.2 per cent of the song’s royalties. Let’s all wish him luck.
But Sellaband is doing something subtly different. It’s effectively building a machine that will hand over traditional industry roles (talent spotting, investment, PR) to internet users and relying on “wisdom-of-crowds” to build careers. It’s a modus operandi that recently earned its own media buzzword . . . crowdsourcing.
And Sellaband isn’t the only recent start-up applying the crowdsourcing model to music. Earlier this year, three Brown University students spent their final semester designing a kind of online new music market, where a track’s popularity determines its price. Amie Street was officially launched a few weeks ago and already it has sold more than 30,000 songs. New music is made available as a free download. But the more it’s downloaded the more its price increases, up to a maximum of 98 cents a track. If you buy and then recommend a track, and its price rises, you earn a little profit, which is paid into your Amie Bank. Artists earn 70 per cent of sales and build a fanbase through the ad hoc social networks that grow out of incentivised music recommendation.
Both Sellaband and Amie Street will be the focus of intense industry speculation in coming weeks. The music is of high quality, and there’s room for the cream to rise to the top. But what about when they get busier? More fundamentally, what, asks Luke Bevans, new media manager for the Mercury, Vertigo and Def Jam labels, makes early technology adopters the best judges of music — or, for that matter, the best musicians? “Having a degree in online marketing doesn’t make you a good musician,” he argues, “I know great unsigned bands that don’t even have e-mail addresses.”
In the meantime, Ward-Murphy has no doubt about Sellaband’s value: “I’ve had people from all over contact me . . . people who have believed, and people who haven’t believed, even. It’s very encouraging.”
www.sellaband.com
