Sellaband

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

~ the obituary ~

i was never on either side of sellaband. i did not have a band asking strangers for money, and i was not the kind of fan who put cash into one. this was a music-industry idea out of the netherlands, aimed at people trying to make a record, and that was simply not a room i ever stood in. so i am telling it from outside the door.

it started in august 2006, built by three people who came out of the business, two of them former sony bmg, one former shell. the mechanic was neat. a band posts a profile, fans buy "parts" in it at ten dollars each, and when a band reaches five thousand parts, fifty thousand dollars, it gets a proper studio album paid for and recorded. this was crowdfunding before most people had heard the word. kickstarter did not even launch until 2009.

by the time i understood what it had been, it was already a footnote in the story of crowdfunding, the one that came before the one everybody remembers. it raised over three million dollars for its artists across its run, which sounds like a lot until you see how much a studio album costs and how few bands can pull a crowd that deep. that gap is what eventually caught up with it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

the promise to a fan was part patronage, part gamble. you were not just donating, you were buying into a band you believed in, and if the record did well there was supposed to be something in it for you. the promise to a band was a way around the label, a way to raise real recording money straight from the people who already liked you. on paper it lined up beautifully. in practice it needed a steady supply of both hungry bands and fans with spare cash, and those two things did not always show up together.

~ the slide ~

the press turned on it when it could not help public enemy fund a new album, which was a bad look for a platform whose whole point was funding artists. then the site went offline for "maintenance" in early 2010, which is rarely a good sign. on the twenty-second of february 2010 an amsterdam court turned its suspension of payments into a full bankruptcy. a buyer stepped in and bailed it out, and it limped on under german ownership for a few more years, quieter each time you looked.

~ what replaced it ~

the second bankruptcy filing came in august 2015, and a berlin court rejected it in early 2016 for lack of assets, which is a grim way to go: too broke even to be wound up properly. by then the idea it pioneered had won everywhere else. kickstarter and later patreon took the same basic bet, fans paying artists directly, and made it ordinary. sellaband got there first and did not live to see it become the normal way things are done.

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