Pledge Music

As the music industry looks toward a brave new world, the tides of doing business are changing. The mighty have fallen. The unapproachable are vulnerable. The field has evened. And the good news among all of this is that fans are closer to their favorite musicians than ever before.

Enter Pledge Music. While they’re not the only ones using the model of fans funding the artist’s recordings, they’re doing it quite well. It’s a fascinating concept that artists like Tina Dico and The Damnwells have used recently, putting Pledge Music on the map for other up-and-coming artists wondering how to get their next record made in this current economic climate. And since we wanted to see inside the machine, of sorts, PM’s Benji Rogers (pictured above right with co-founder Malcolm Dunbar) offered to give us some time to explain how Pledge got started and why it’s working so well.

SSv: For those totally unfamiliar with Pledge and the business model, can you give us a quick rundown?

Benji Rogers: What happened was I’d been a musician myself for the last 15 or so years and I was touring for nine or so years continuously with different bands across the U.S. We had a couple indie deals that didn’t work in our favor, I can say diplomatically. One day I was lying in bed at my mom’s place on a trip back home to the U.K. about to do some touring in Amsterdam and Holland and saw this idea. My fans had been so good to me for my entire musical career that I wondered if they’d want to be a part of making records with me. If I gave them exclusive access to touring and recording and things like that, would they want to be a part of it from the beginning?

My fans have always been the greatest. When I was playing, there were always drinks for me. They’d offer to cook me dinner or give me places to stay. So what I tried to do was rather than just sell them a CD, I wanted to give them extra things. I looked online and it didn’t exist. I knew some people were fan-centered, but I didn’t really find what I saw in my head.

So I thought we’d create a bunch of cool ways for fans to purchase in and then reward those fans with exclusive pledgers only page where they could see video blogs, rough mixes, time in the studio that you’d never get to see. Plus they get the b-sides as the record is being made, so when they actually hold the disc in their hands, it’s more meaningful than something they went and bought in the store because they went along on the journey with the artist.

The charity aspect is very much frowned upon in the U.K. but in the U.S., it’s quite popular. One of the reasons to do that under the Pledge model was because we take such a small percentage and therefore, the profits are higher for the bands, what I figured was that you could get charities involved to help everyone. The caveat we say to the bands signing up with us is that it has to be a charity that’s meaningful to you. Don’t do it in the hopes the charity will mail out to their mailing list. It’s gotta be real.

For me, Amnesty is a great charity for personal reasons. I said, ‘Listen, we can raise money for you and then drop it off. Or you could help out. Either way, I’ll still brings checks to you.’ They were very happy with that and they’ve since done some blogging and that kind of thing. But really, I think you can basically make your business as a musician socially conscious and it doesn’t take away from what you’re doing. So anyway, that’s how it emerged and I basically built the company from there.

SSv: So how long have you been at this?

Benji: We basically started a year and a half ago and we spent a lot of time in pre-production getting the idea ready and defined. Then we launched in late June and early July with alpha projects, which was my record. I sought to raise $5,000 in a month and we raised it in six days. It ended up at around $9,000 so we recorded the record, did videos of all the recording and then posted them and took pledges to see as it went along. We delivered the record about a week ago.

So I did it myself to prove it could work on the small level and then we put Tina Dico in the system. She sells well in Denmark, her native land, and her fans were absolutely crazy about her. The only complaint we had is that she didn’t offer enough cool incentive packages. They all sold out. So when the only thing left to sell were regular CDs and downloads, it speaks to the business model strength that fans want anything the artist has touched. They want whatever the artist is involved with and you have to tailor that to what the artist and their fans want.

SSv: So this came as a result of you doing it and knowing it could work first-hand.

Benji: Absolutely. Exactly. Basically I wouldn’t have let anyone else touch the system. I know my fans. They’re very loyal, very wonderful people. So I said to them, ‘Listen, this is a prototype. Things will go wrong.’ [Laughs] But the other thing is that we don’t charge anybody until a set amount is reached. So if someone wants to raise $10,000, we don’t charge until all $10,000 is raised. There’s no danger of fans losing money if a project doesn’t meet its goal.

Another aspect of that is that the larger acts we work with don’t necessarily need money up front. But they do ask for a certain number of pledges rather than a specific amount of money. They’ll ask for 3,000 pledgers instead.

SSv: Everyone talks about everything that’s wrong with the music industry. But it seems you’re tapping into something that’s right, or what can be right.

Benji: Essentially, I’m a brat of the major label era. I come from a family of managers; my mother, my stepfather and father were all managers of bands who signed multi-million dollar deals. They all were quite successful and one band is still quite big. But what I saw was that the major labels don’t really do much wrong. It’s just that musicians have a hard time with what they do. I sat on a panel with a guy who works for a major label recently – a really nice guy – and he said he was really nervous because everyone’s bashing the majors. I said, ‘The problem is that you’ve sent the wrong message. Tell them the truth about what you do.’

Major labels sell over 300,000 units. If you’re not going to do that, then the model doesn’t work. So essentially, all these indie bands that sign to these big labels know what they’re getting into but then they’re frustrated when it doesn’t work. That’s not to say that you can’t have a viable business and attend to 30,000 range. It’s totally doable and scaleable at every level.

I also think one of the biggest questions we get asked at Pledge is, ‘Well, I could see how this works if you have a database if you have 50,000 people, but what if you only have 600.’ My answer is to that is always this: you need to organically grow your business. You need people to see you live. You need to make all those mistakes on stage. You need to make the album that’s all rushed and hurried and urgent, so that your fans who are there from the beginning are really with you.

The thing the labels do is take that act with 500 fans and catapult them to a massive level where they’re not ready for it yet. So it doesn’t work. They’re trying to somehow hold on to 500,000 fans and there’s no build time on it. It’s too instant. I think that what a lot of bands like Dave Matthews was doing when they were coming through the college circuit was just play and play and play in front of people. They were really good at building that community.

So what I’m trying to build with Pledge is to build a community of people who not only follow their artists, but they support them and they’re with them in the process. So it can be very meaningful. There are people in the credits for my album who actually did help me reproduce my record because they helped make it. It’s a wonderful transaction to have.

The major labels aren’t wrong in what they try to do, which is sell millions of albums. But if you’re an indie artist and you’re not Mariah Carey or Lady Gaga, don’t sign to a major label because they won’t give you what you want. They will try to shove you down as many people’s throats as possible and if that’s what you want, it doesn’t always work. It’s not as personal and the music business is boutique and personal and it should stay that way.

SSv: So the emphasis is on keeping the organic build?

Benji: Absolutely. For example, there’s a couple bands we’re working with who are trying to raise $1,500 to $2,000. That’s what they need for where they are. But you can have the opposite. We had a guy Colin Smith on our site and our system projected he would raise about $1,000. Our minimum at this point is $1,500, so I said to him that I wasn’t very comfortable launching him too early because I didn’t know if he would make it or not. He said he would make $10,000 and he would shoot for that amount. I begged him not to, but he fought me all the way.

So finally I said, ‘Look, fine. But if it fails, it fails. There’s nothing I can do.’ He raised $23,000. He wrote the best campaign. He did it for an amazing charity. And what he proved to us at Pledge was that he worked it so well because he was in continual communication with his fans – through Twitter, on Pledge, through his Facebook or website. He gave them all of him. His charity was called Musicians On Call where he went to play in hospitals for sick kids. He talked about it very openly and took videos. So his fans really fell in love with what he was doing.

He ended up delivering the record and he was so thankful, so grateful. We flew out to New York and presented the charity with the check together. We actually match that amount of money raised, so it was so positive. And what it showed him is that he’s ready for more people to see him. The pledges proved that. So a lot of labels look at what we do. Basically if I’m A&R at a label, I want to look at who’s doing well on Pledge because it’s an accurate reflection of what that person’s career could look like. So if they’re not doing well at Pledge, you’d think twice of signing them. And the other way around. So because we don’t own any rights, the band can sign a deal straight out of Pledge or while it’s going on. It’s all available to them.

SSv: Do you find this works for any band or is there a musical genre or style that works better than others?

Benji: To be honest, we’re a little too young to be able to tell by genre. I know that singer/songwriters seem to be very successful because that’s a very personal connection. We just had a band called The Damnwells hit their target with $20,000 and their fans were incredible. Again, I think it’s open to anybody willing to put in the work. It’s not the kind of system where you sign up and then it will raise money on its own. You have to put up video once a week. You have to use Twitter and Facebook. You have to give something of yourself to make it work and those that do get a massive return on their investment.