Aug 05

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GoRankem

I always thought I was pretty on top of my music knowledge, and had a good grip on the various kinds of genres, top hits, and artists out there. But, as I have recently discovered, I thought way too highly of my knowledge of music. For some of you this may come as a shock, but until about three weeks ago, I had no idea who Fleet Foxes were, and had never heard their music. I was introduced to them by a friend because he could no longer stand the idea of having to drive to work with me again while listening to “my” music. He burned me a CD of songs he felt were “better” than mine and that was when my narrow and limited knowledge of music became very apparent. 

This idea of discovering new bands and artists started to intrigue me since I had been so stuck in my ways of only listening to my music, that I never really gave myself the chance to go out and explore. But, as I quickly learned, this exploring thing was not as easy as I thought. There are thousands of artists out there with multiple albums and I suddenly became very overwhelmed and defeated. This task was way larger than I anticipated and I was very close to giving up on my new project. Luckily, I was sent an article about an online site that makes the process of discovering new artists and bands a lot easier. GoRankem.com is “crowdsourcing the music discovery process. By aggregating the expertise of the existing fanbase for every artist, the prospective fans can more easily embrace a new artist or dive deeper into a catalog than they ever had before” (GoRankem). The site not only offers rankings on the artist’s best songs, but also provides interactive features between its members.

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Nov 12

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This is an exclusive guest post from musican Derek Evans, who is currently using the PledgeMusic platform to crowd-source money for an upcoming album and 3 non-profit organizations.  I asked Derek to write this blog post to share with you his experiences of embarking on a crowd-sourcing project, as I think he has a multitude of valuable insight on the topic. I hope you agree.

Go check out Derek’s PledgeMusic project and say hi to him on Twitter with your questions and comments.

-Brendan
Derek Evans

My name is Derek Evans. I am a musician who started a project called “Music With A Cause.” A project to help raise money for my upcoming album, 3 non-profit organizations, and challenge myself to build a new audience in the process. Here is my story.

Today’s independent musicians have many advantages. Five years ago we did not have active tools such as Fanbridge, Add This, Facebook, ReverbNation, Soundcloud, Kickstarter, PledgeMusic, Band Camp, ArtistData etc. What I mean by “active” tools is that there are various ways you can easily create and maintain a solid business with little, but consistent, effort. At the end of August 2010, I decided that I was going to use PledgeMusic to combine two of my greatest passions: Music and Charity. However, I decided to give myself a challenge. Prior to launching my project, “Music With A Cause”, I spent about 3 months looking at other artists projects. I wanted to see how people were engaging their fans. I wanted to understand why others were featured and why some were left behind. It quickly became clear that the people who were doing well, for the most part, had their business module in effect. What I am talking about here is the modern day artist taking responsibility for the real work involved with a campaign/building a business.

Going into “Music With A Cause” I had the following challenges:

  1. I would not target friends
  2. I would not target family
  3. I would not target people currently on my mailing list
  4. I became ill in June 2010 and eventually had to have a tumor removed in September 2010 (Finally back to health in November 2010 with 13 days remaining as of today)
    • This created a greater challenge because I would be in and out of the hospital
      I did not have the ability to generate new fans from playing live shows
  5. I would be donating the majority of the proceeds to 3 non-profit organizations:
    • Lemonstoaid.org
      Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research in memory of my grandfather
      Dana-Faber.org- The funds would go directly to a friend of mine who was recently diagnosed with cancer
  6. Understanding what kind of person I am and how that effects my business

The idea is that if I followed through the steps below accordingly, the project work by itself. Therefore, not having to worry that if I was ill and in the hospital and ultimately seeing if my challenge within the project would work.

Click read more to hear Derek’s steps…

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