Fan Funded Forum

Enter Shikari formed in St. Albans, England in 2003 they are a post-hardcore band with a mix of trance. During 2003 and 2004, the band released three demo EPs that were available from their website and their considerable number of live gigs. Their extensive touring built a considerable fanbase and they were offered a spot on the Gibson/MySpace stage at 2006′s Download Festival. On November 4, 2006, they became only the second unsigned band to ever sell out London Astoria (the first being The Darkness). There followed a major record label frenzy to sign the band.

In late 2006, despite many huge offers from major labels, the band announced that they had decided to ‘go it alone’ on their own label, Ambush Reality, with assistance from their distributor Vital (PIAS).

The band’s debut album, Take to the Skies, was released on March 19, 2007 and on March 25 it reached number 4 in the UK Official Album Charts and went on to be certified Gold in the UK and sell 250,000 copies worldwide.

Enter Shikari have since licensed their releases to Tiny Evil Records n the USA, Which is an Interscope imprint and part of Universal. Ambush Reality have also signed a distribution deal with Warner Music in order to make the album Common Dreads and future releases, more accessible outside of the UK and also more widely advertised and promoted.

Second album Common Dreads was released through Ambush Reality on the 15th June 2009 and debuted at #16 on the UK top 40 album chart.

www.entershikari.com

Jake Shillingford is a singer/songwriter and founder of the cult orchestral alternative band My Life Story. A key player during the Britpop years, the 12-piece released 3 albums (2 on Parlaphone), countless singles and achieved 6 top 40 hits in the UK.

When sales declined and MLS were dropped by Parlaphone, they managed to push out one further album in 1998 on independent IT Records, also releasing the first ever internet only single. It seemed that Shillingfords artistic days could be numbered however he has been able to continue earn a living producing music to this day due to tapping into the power of his fans.

Shillingford has released two dark electronic pop albums under the name ExileInside through his own imprint Exilophone Records which owes its existence to a small team of private backers: called the /Investor Angels. The investment scheme is based on the traditional notion of patronage common throughout European cultural history where benefactors would subsidise artistic creation.

Over the past 5 years the Angels have made financial contributions in order for Jake to record, manufacture and release music as well as tour and promote current material. We have replaced the traditional role of the record company with our fans enabling us to run our own genuinely independent label.

The Exilophone mantra is: MADE FOR THE PEOPLE: PAID FOR BY THE PEOPLE

After a 6-year hiatus, Jake reformed My Life Story in 2006 to promote a ‘best of album’ released through his fan funded label. Jake is currently recording a fan funded album under his own name. Jake also lectures on the virtues of autonomy in the music industry from esteemed venues such as the ICA to The Brighton Institute of Modern Music.

www.jakeshillingford.com

Record labels, artists and other Music Companies are increasingly exploring alternative income models for music such as: Subscription Model, Playlist Model (”Url as Mp3″ such as Spotify) and the Fan Funded Model pioneered by artists like Marillion Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails and then made accessable to all by companies like SellaBand.com, Kickstarter, Pledgemusic.com etc

ArtistShare is a business model for musicians which allows them to fund their projects outside of the traditional recording industry model. It utilizes a “fan-funding” model to allow the general public to directly finance, watch the creative process of the recording, and in most cases gain access to extra material from an artist. It was founded in 2003 by Brian Camelio, a professional musician/producer in response to the threat of digital piracy and the futility of digital rights management for music. The ArtistShare model ensures that artists are compensated for their work before it is released. It is widely recognized as the first model of its kind for the purpose of funding artistic works through the Internet.

ArtistShare describe themselves as a hybrid company part record label, part social networking site, part new media marketing and promotion part business consultancy. And they are not just for music they have film and book projects on their platform. Artists and fans connect on a deep level to create long lasting deeper relationships.

Mission: Creation of new art and music despite any destructive technology that may come along.

Success: Since the establishment of ArtistShare, the label’s artists have received four Grammy awards and eleven nominations including Maria Schneider’s Concert in the Garden which was the first recording in history to win a Grammy without being available in retail stores.

www.artistshare.com

On the threshold of what was by many expected to be a major breakthrough for the band, Turbonegro withdrew from the music business and appeared unlikely to ever return. While there were several reasons, fundamentally Hank von Helvete’s drug addiction made it impossible for him to continue. Leaving the band to undergo treatment for heroin dependency as well as his struggle with depression, Hank von Helvete returned to his childhood town in northern Norway. There he worked at a radio station and as a guide at a whaling museum.

Another issue was that the band was stuck in an oppressive record deal with Boomba. The arrangement saw very little money directed to the band. In 1999 Hamburg based Bitzcore Records who had been running the bands fan club and merchandise bought the contracts from Boomba. The band gave them their backing on the understanding that Bitzcore would never mention the word “reunion”.

Bitzcore then went on to re-issue the entire back-catalogue and a posthumous live album entitled Darkness Forever! Bitzcore’s master stroke was to record a tribute album with a line-up that includes Queens of the Stone Age, Nashville Pussy, Therapy?, HIM, Bela B. & Denim Girl aka German technopop star Blümchen. In order to promote this release Bitzcore produced a limited run of St Pauli Turbojugend Denim Jackets. These were in huge demand and when they saw one change hands on ebay for hugely inflated price they knew they were onto something. They then made it possible to order a jacket or “kutte” with your home town jugend on the back. (so long as you were able to order three – President, Vice-President and Ass-istant). These jackets have gone on to provide the band with a handsome income and showed that the Turbonegro fanbase were as strong as ever.

When Quart Festival approached the band in 2002 with the offer of more money for one show than they had seen for whole tours Turbonegro literally came back from the dead. The band continue to go from strength to strength with one of the strongest and most loyal fanbases of any band around.

www.turbonegro.com
www.turbojugend.net

Brian Joseph Burton is the man behind Danger Mouse who in 2004 sampled The Beatles without permission, mixing the Fab Four’s ‘White Album’ with Jay-Z’s ‘The Black Album’ to create the controversial and instantly vetoed ‘The Grey Album. EMI (copyright holders of the Beatles) quickly stopped the producer’s plans to release the album only to see Internet protesters organise a 24-hour free give-a-way which they named ‘Grey Tuesday’ – the album was downloaded 100,000 times far more than the 3000 copies Danger Mouse had originally planned to press up. EMI had had tried to put out a fire but had simply fanned the flames and made a star out of their target.

He went on to form Gnarls Barkley with Cee-Lo Green, who’s first single ‘Crazy’ was the first in the UK to go no 1 on download sales alone, and produced their albums St. Elsewhere and The Odd Couple. He produced the second Gorillaz album, 2005′s Demon Days, as well as Beck’s 2008 record, Modern Guilt. He was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Producer of the Year category. In addition, Burton worked with rapper MF DOOM as DANGERDOOM, and released the albums The Mouse and the Mask, and Occult Hymn.

Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, an EMI artists whos albums Burton had produced, set about planning a unique project – ‘Dark Night of The Soul’ is 13 track album that features guest vocals from Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Nina Persson, Suzanne Vega, Iggy Pop, Wayne Coyne and Jason Lytle – it is the sound track to an audio visual art callaboration with film auteur David Lynch who has produced 100+ page book of photography inspired by the record. The two were supposed to be released together but after a statement from Danger Mouse disclosing ongoing dispute with EMI the book was put on sale along with a blank CD-R and a label that read: “For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.”

When asked about the legalities of this decision Danger Mouse has said:
“I don’t know who owns the record, I just know that I don;t want to spend years in court trying to fight it. The worst thing that I could think of was is this record didn’t get out there and people didn’t hear it… If there was another way I would have definitely done it…

AS CD’s are slowly but surely confined to history, artists are looking at entirely new ways of raising their profiles and generating income. The recent partnership betweek UK house act Groove Armada and rum brand Bacardi is a good example of this. The deal: Groove Armada released an EP, backed by Bacardi, instead of a record label, through Bacardi-branded website B-Live Share. This was publicised through online social networks and aloowed users to gain access to more free songs the more they spread the word. The music was also later sold through itunes. Groove Armada also performed at a number of Bacardi-branded gigs around the world. The result was an award winning campaign that gained much recognition.

The two way benefits of this approach are clear. Groove Armada’s manager Dan O’Neill says: “A lot of the talk is about how brands are now using music, but I would suggest it is the bands that are getting more savvy about how best to use brands,”. Dan is also founder of music consultancy www.the-angle.com. he points out that being connected to a brand with a global awarness can have a huge impact on an artist’s profile. “One of the things that we hadn’t been able to do with a major was to take the music to as many places as we wanted.”

As well as being a reaction to changes in the industry, this innovative approach is a clear sign that consumers are evolving. People are much harder to reach by traditional advertising now.

Marillion are widely considered within the industry to have been one of the first mainstream acts to have fully recognised and tapped the potential for commercial musicians to interact with their fans via the Internet circa 1996, and are nowadays often characterised as a rock & roll ‘Web Cottage Industry’.

The band have always been renowned for having an extremely dedicated following with some fans regularly travelling significant distances to attend single gigs, when a bunch of American fans clubbed together to finance a tour of USA, somewhere that the band had not visited for some years, they realised maybe there was a lot more they could achieve with fan power.

The band unhappy with their record label situation, decided to try a radical experiment by asking their fans if they would help fund the recording of the next album by pre-ordering it before recording even started. They result was over 12,000 pre-orders which raised enough money to record and release Anoraknophobia in 2001. The band licensed the album to EMI on terms that gave them more input over areas such as promotion.

The success of Anoraknophobia allowed the band to start recording their next album, but they decided to leverage their fanbase once again to help raise money towards marketing and promotion of a new album. The band put up the album for pre-order in mid-production. This time fans responded by pre-ordering 18,000 copies. This time Marillion set up their own label to release the album. They have since released two more successful albums in this way showing a sustained revitalisation of the bands fortunes.

On 9th September 2008, Marillion pre-released their own album via P2P networks themselves. Upon attempting to play the downloaded files, users were shown a video from the band explaining why they had taken this route. Downloaders were then able to opt to purchase the album at a user-defined price or select to receive DRM-free files for free, in exchange for an email address. The band explained that although they did not support piracy, they realised their music would inevitably be shared in this manner anyway, and wanted to attempt to engage with p2p users and make the best of a bad situation.

www.marillion.com