You’re a musician. You have a band or you’re a solo artist and you are desperately looking for halls to play, spaces to practice, a studio to record in, financing to self-produce your record, IT people to create a website, photographers to immortalise you, designers who can create your logo and creative minds to give a visual identity to your posters, your promotional materials, your record covers…

You also need many collaborators and people to help lend a hand with the community management of your numerous social network accounts, the collection of valuable contacts from magazines, blogs and websites to appear in and halls and festivals to play, and also with the intensive search for concerts and the consequent negotiation of the indispensible appearance fee.

And you still need something else, like any emerging musician: financing for recording and self-producing your next work, or the creation of your first video.

In this article, we intend to offer a summary of the tools online that can help you to:

- Micro-finance your musical projects

- Help you find concerts

Micro-finance your music projects thanks to the famous “crowdfunding”.

Crowdfunding or collective financing has formed part of the lives of creative minds for 5 years already. And the truth is it works.

What do you have to do to launch your project and receive financing? Simply write out your project, calculating with precision the budget that you need to reach your goal and think of “compensation” you will give in exchange for 2, 5, 10, 100 or more Euros for your project.

There are various platforms that can help on this path.

Verkami.

Probably the best known crowdfunding platform in Spain these days. Once your project is published, you have 40 days to get the money from “patrons”. Only the projects that reach 100% of the financing receive the money provided by the patrons. Verkami takes 5% of the funds that the projects collect in this case. Pay attention though! To this 5% we have to add that the bank will also charge a commission between 1.30 and 1.45% for each payment made by card.

Pledge Music.

“PledgeMusic is a music company offering you a new way to take control of your career.” Specialising in music, PledgeMusic works in the same way as Verkami, but they charge a “flat rate” of 15% of all funds collected (to which they do NOT add the costs of transaction). To reach your goal you can choose one of three time limits: 30, 60 or 90 days.

yoquierograbar.com.

yoquierograbar.com is a platform associated with Millenia Estudios, a music recording and production centre located in Valencia. On their website it is a little difficult to understand the goals of the platform, on the one hand it seems to offer all the services of other crowdfunding platforms, but when it’s time to “publish your project”, it is presented as “another tool to finance projects for our clients and create them with the maximum assurance and quality.

To request your estimate please contact Millenia Estudios”. Read very carefully before sending your project then.

Crearock.es

Crearock.es is a platform belonging to Grupo Rock Estatal [State Rock Group].

They charge 6.3 % commission (5% + 1.3% in bank commissions). The advantage of Crearock is that the projects that have reached the deadline (for the first phase) and that have collected more than 66% of the total can, if they wish, continue collecting for another 30 days the amount that they are missing and continue collecting until they reach 100% (you can never go above 100%).

Rockanddream.com

Rockanddream.com is a platform in beta version that offers the public, bands and spaces that host live music, the possibility of collectively financing their concerts.

On their website they explain that “A concert is successfully funded when 75% venue capacity can be guaranteed before funding deadline.” In Rockanddream bands or musicians choose the hall and propose a day to give the concert. Later they establish the price at the door and also begin to collectively finance the concert. If the goal is not reached before the deadline, the concert is cancelled and the collections from the public are returned.

Other platforms that can be of help to set up and finance concerts are Bandeed and Montatuconcierto.

For us it’s important to highlight the need, before sending a project to any of these platforms to check their terms of use in depth. Some of these platforms do not detail the commission that they will take from the collection in their terms of use, which can be a bit tricky. Also it needs to be clearly written that the rights of the project belong to the creator, not to the platform.

Do you know of another crowdfunding platform that has been useful and effective for you? Write a commentary and share it with the readers of the Lab.