“Never ask for money”. That’s Benji Roger’s mantra. While crowdsourced funding for the arts has taken off and slowly breaks mainstream; Benji and his crew at Pledge Music have a different take on how bands and fans can share the experience of making a record or tour. We’ve been chatting with Benji the past few months about a lot of things and felt it was time we dropped a slew of questions in his lap and let him have at it. So here we go….read all of it.
Tell me about Pledge Music. What is it that you do?
We’re a direct to fan platform specializing in fundraising, digital marketing and the creating of amazing direct to fan releases in general with a part of the profits from each campaign going to a charity of the artists choice. We focus on the experiential side of the releasing of music via a system of Pledgers only updates from which the artists offer the fans anything from rough mixes, video blogs, demos, live tracks and that sort of thing to private concerts and memorabilia. We help our artists come up with the most imaginative and exciting way to get their music to their fans. We’re not a fan funding company, we don’t really do pre-sales. PledgeMusic is first and foremost a music company. We also have a record label and a publishing company.
There are other crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter, but Pledge takes a more “hands on” roll with bands, correct?
Yes as I stated above we don’t consider what we do fan funding, or to put it another way: all music is fan funded, it’s just a question of where in the timeline the transaction takes place. The reason I do not favor the terms “fan” or “crowd” funding is that they refer to and focus on a transaction. “Fund my album” or “Donate to my tour fund” are not, to my mind, appealing. This is also why we do not disclose the target amount of money to the fans. It’s hard enough to get fans to buy albums once they are made, let alone fund them before they are even in the can and so, by placing the emphasis on the bands “needs” seems to me to look desperate. Crowd sourcing sites are fantastic for proof of concept types of projects, but I would argue that you never want to offer your music to the people who in most cases look up to you, and say in effect: This is worth $10,000 and if you think it’s good enough give me $10 and I’ll go make an album.” Worse you don’t want to let your fans know that your album is worth $250,000 and then not hit your target. The way these campaigns are conceived is what’s key and that is where we really have been effective. If a band signs up from the web we succeed in getting them to their target 75% of the time. If it’s an artist who really engages with us or that we have approached, our success rate is over 85%. If you do some digging you will see that this is very high indeed. Fans want experiences, they want to share what they are doing and not what they are buying. It’s not about a dollar amount at the end of the day. In fact this is a hindrance rather than a help. It’s about a shared experience. It’s not about bundles or straight up-selling either. It’s about what and who the artist is and the way in which they engage with their fans. We help people to get their records made or their tours under way with as much integrity and, to quote one our current Pledge artists, Cornershop, “as much decorum as possible.”
What spawned the idea of Pledge in the first place?
Something had to give. I was making music and doing pretty well but something in me saw that the industry as it was, was just not going to be able to sustain itself. There were some amazing tools out there for independent artists to use but none that popped into my head the way that Pledge did. I saw in my head “artists, fans & charities” and set about building it. All of a sudden, I realised that it was a much bigger undertaking than was possible by just one man and a computer and so we took it to the next level. The guiding principle is that everybody wins. It has been from the start and continues to be so today.
Tell me about a couple success stories and/or bands that wanted to but didn’t work with Pledge and how they faired in the long run?
We have had some incredible success stories. Multiple artists have been signed to record and publishing deals from indies to majors and we have also worked with artists who have been dropped and it has, in their words, given them a new found confidence in their abilities to engage with their fans and to carry on or even surpass where they were. Something that their labels were, in most cases, not set up to do. We have artists raising hundreds of thousands of dollars which is amazing but equally incredible is when a new artist gets what they need to make the first trip to SXSW happen or to get their first CD made. We are firm with the artists we work with on what we think they can realistically achieve using the system and, as such, artists will often go to different sites where they can shoot for higher target amounts than we would let them launch with. They mostly fail to hit these targets and so get nothing which is a shame. The point is that it’s not just a simple whack it up there, choose a number and go for it game. It requires knowledge and organization to achieve success in the direct to fan space. We have been lucky, in that, management companies use us multiple times, as do artists. Most of our business comes from other artists who have used us. Just check the homepage for their testimonials. We are fortunate indeed to have earned such loyalty and we fully intend to keep it that way.
You started a label and publishing company recently to help some bands who’ve used Pledge. Tell me about that.
It was the next logical step. We have an amazing A&R tool at our disposal and we actually found ourselves competing with labels who wanted to sign acts out of the system in some cases. An artist can really prove themselves to a label, manager or publisher using the system and can do so without looking desperate or needy as they go about it. Also, in the cases of artists we have signed, we have seen how they perform and they have by their own success proven their viability. Since often, the artists have paid for their album already using the system, we can spend on marketing & promotion and therefore offer a better deal than other labels can. But it has to be something that we can put our hands on hearts and say that we can make it work. The deals we offer are incredibly fair to the artists and involve limited terms. I have no interest in offering an artist anything that I myself would not sign as a musician and when the deal leaves us, it does so in that fashion. Whilst it is a new label, we have the most incredible people with decades of music business experience who are now running things at PledgeMusic and so it wasn’t a big leap. I am obsessed by what works. If we can make it work we will try. If we can’t then we will say so. It’s a very open and fair thing. It is a lot of work but it is amazing. Our first release is with The Damnwells album, on March 15th, and we couldn’t be happier. We have a great team working the record. Their campaign was amazing and truly showed us the potential of the band and the system.
How are you different from Kickstarter and/or a site like Crowdbands?
“Never ask your fans for money!” You have no idea how sick my team are of hearing me say this but it’s the truth. I love Kickstarter and what Yancey and his team have built, is truly an amazing funding tool. I have pledged on a few of their projects, including an artist who went with them rather than us. The thing is, that as a musician myself, I would not want to open up my finances in that way to my fans. Simply asking your fans for money, which is what crowd funding sites do, does work in some cases but in general is not successful enough of the time for my comfort level and I believe that it’s because it is just that; fundraising. For products, software, movies etc… it all makes total sense but not for music. I built what I wanted to use and what I thought would stand the best chance of succeeding. I mean, if you want to simply ask your fans for money, then a paypal button on your website with a “donate here” should do the trick. But it’s not really too compelling and isn’t something I would ever want to do. The way in which fans receive their information from you is of critical importance, no matter what level you are at. Our Pledgers only updates page, which is where artists reward their fans for their participation no matter the financial level, is really where our campaigns shine as this is ultimately where the fan is getting the experience or the journey of the album/tour as it is being undertaken. We try and help our artists to come up with new and interesting things to offer their fans, but more than that, we challenge them to deliver what they would want to receive from their favourite artists, to the people that they are making this music for in the first place. In turn, the fans reward the band by spending more and in the process the charity makes a little something too. So in short, everybody: artists, fans and charities, win. Can’t beat that really.
Is it important for bands to have a “.com” type site or do you think they can get by with a mix of services i.e. MySpace, BandPage, Bandcamp and Bandzoogle?
Bandzoogle is one of the best platforms I have come across and I use it to this day and have done for years. I think it’s important to have all means for people to get involved with you, made available to them. But the key is to let your fans share what they are doing. A website with no one on it is pointless. If you can’t upkeep one, don’t! But primarily our Pledge success come from e-mail addresses (essential to have an email list) Facebook and then Twitter. The point is to interact with fans in the setting of their choosing. If they want to do this on Facebook, fine! But always get an e-mail address. There are tons of great tools out there for doing this. Free ones at that!
What’s the future hold for Pledge…what can we expect to see?
We want to stay excellent and to keep the quality of what we do and the service that we offer at the front of our minds . I think that we will be working with more labels in the future as part of the release strategies for their artists and we are also in the process of signing more artists to the label and to the publishing company. I think that we can achieve a 90% success rate across all of the artists that we work with and so we haven’t got that far to go. The system will get smarter, and I hope we will too, and we are just now lining up some incredible music for this new year and we are already beating our own expectations. I want to get as much money into the hand of our artists in the shortest possible time and to get more amazing music out there and into the ears of the fans who so desperately want it. It’s going to be brilliant!
