PledgeMusic

» see pledgemusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

PledgeMusic opened to artists in August 2009, eleven months after Benji Rogers registered the company at Companies House, and for most of a decade nobody had a bad word for the model. A musician announced a record before recording it. Fans paid up front and picked a tier, so the cheap one got you the album and the expensive one got you a signed sleeve or a house concert or your name printed in the booklet. The platform took its cut and passed the rest along. By 2014 roughly nine campaigns in ten were hitting target and the average one closed at 140 percent of goal.

The flaw sat in the plumbing rather than the pitch. Pledge money went into PledgeMusic's own account instead of a segregated client account, which meant a company holding other people's presale cash could spend it on rent and payroll and then cover last quarter's artist payouts out of this quarter's campaigns. That arrangement works for exactly as long as the volume keeps climbing. Somewhere around 2017 it stopped climbing.

Artists began reporting late payments in early 2018 while the 2017 accounts went overdue at Companies House and the company said nothing. On 24 January 2019 it admitted publicly that payments were behind. Rogers, who had left in 2016, came back unpaid to try to steady the thing, and by 8 May he was saying administration was imminent. The website went dark in the second half of July. A winding-up petition reached the High Court on 31 July, and on 19 August 2019 the court granted permission to liquidate.

None of this was my economy. Presale direct-to-fan needs a western mid-tier act with a few thousand people willing to wire money a year before a record exists, and there was no Turkish version of that transaction I could have joined in 2012 even if I had wanted one. What I recognize here is the failure rather than the product. A company held a float in its own name and treated it as revenue, and that pattern travels in every currency there is.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the money actually moved ~

The public story was a marketplace for vinyl and tickets, with a crowdfunding layer bolted on for recording costs. The internal story by 2018 was that new campaigns had become the funding source for old ones. Staff who worked there afterward described being told to keep launching, because launches brought in cash and the cash was needed to pay artists whose campaigns had already closed months earlier. Everybody in the building could see which way that runs.

The tell was visible from outside too, if you knew where to look. An artist whose campaign funded in March would ask about payment in June and be given a date, then be given a new date in August. On the forums they found other artists in exactly the same position. By late 2018 there were enough of those threads to make a pattern.

~ what the receiver found ~

The Official Receiver, S. Rose, filed a report on 21 October 2019 that closed the question of who owned the money. Legal advisors to the PledgeMusic board had concluded that fan payments were not trust monies. They belonged to PledgeMusic. An artist whose fans had raised twenty thousand pounds for a record was not a person whose money had been withheld, in the receiver's framing, but an unsecured creditor standing in line behind everyone else with a claim.

The line was long and the pot was empty. Debt came to 7.4 million pounds against assets of under 20,000. John Zorn was owed $197,559. The band Failure was owed roughly $75,000, and Neil Innes £23,000. Rose wrote that he did not expect to contact creditors again, because there was unlikely to be any payment in the case. There was not.

~ the domain now ~

pledgemusic.com still answers. It serves an American casino affiliate page, ranked lists of real money gambling sites with bonus comparisons, sitting on a domain that ten thousand musicians once sent their audiences to. Nothing on it references what the address used to be.

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