There’s an interesting concept in the DIY music marketing world about online fundraisers for bands. The same way you drive around your favorite fast food restaurant and you’ll see high schoolers out there doing car washes for their field trip to god knows where. Well thanks to the internet and web 2.0 sites you can build a online fundraising campaign for your band.

A lot of times the DIY musical artist will run into one problem, money. As great it is to have complete control over your music when you go DIY/Indie, is the fact that you will still need money to fund your touring, CDs, etc. For those of you losing hope due to financial reasons, don’t! The internet is there to post your car wash fundraising sign to over millions of people out there and the awesome part is, you don’t have to wash anyone’s car.

The one thing you will need though is loyal and supporting fans and CONSTANT new fans to your music and band’s website. It will take a lot of advertising skills and most importantly fans that fit your band’s niche. It may be seem impossible, but a positive outlook to your musical career is a huge part of it all.

According to The Music Snob on their article about Online Fundraising, they’ve discussed a new solution compared to the failed website known as SellABand“I never wrote about Sellaband because it wasn’t something I was personally interested in trying. It only works if you have enough fans to generate a ton of donation money, and judging from my sales to date that just wasn’t gonna happen for me. In the meantime, Sellaband has gone bankrupt and gotten new investors.

This article in the NYTimes highlights some depressing facts not only about Sellaband but the difficulty of creating something unique, and inspiring enough to gather the support you may be wanting for your music:

“Four years in, the SellaBand model has not helped many groups. More than 15,000 artists have set up projects at the site, but fewer than 50 have been fully financed”
There are 13 million music profiles on MySpace, and 4,000 artists on the rosters of the major music labels
While these may be discouraging, the MySpace figure at least is deceptive, since I’m guessing many of those profiles are dead carcasses of former music projects that no longer exist. I’m sure that a couple of them are from my own projects…

To sum it all up: More bands => more competition for the pocketbooks and wallets.

Not that there’s anything surprising about this, really. The other site that the article features is called KickStarter, which bills itself as a “A FUNDING PLATFORM FOR ARTISTS, DESIGNERS, FILMMAKERS, MUSICIANS, JOURNALISTS, INVENTORS, EXPLORERS…” Check it out. I like how it’s targeted not just at musicians but anyone that wants to raise money for any sort of project. I can think of several crazy ideas that would be fun to solicit some funds for. I’ll leave that to your imaginations…”

Article Source: http://www.themusicsnob.com/2010/04/05/online-fundraising-for-bands/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheMusicSnob+(The+Music+Snob)

I’m aiming this post at my DIY indie musical artists out there. It never hurts to try and put up a tip jar for your online fundraising. Fans that believe in your music will do anything to help you rise to the top, but always continue building your fan base and use social networking to the fullest.