How Do I Know When I'm Ready To Launch A Music Crowdfunding Project?
We were asked a great question.
We like to try and give concrete answers to questions; but first, a thought:
Think about scalability and a long term approach.
We commonly see people launch sequential projects over the years, each time learning from the previous project and each time having a clearly bigger and better result. Not every project needs to have some “Hail Mary” goal. Maybe your audience warrants running a project to make $1,000-$1,500. That’s a totally fine place to start.
However, for keeping things simple, for the rest of the article we’re gonna base the answer for this question off of a $5,000 goal example.
What are you making?
Is it a music or film or product?
What TYPE of project is it?
Does it fulfill a need?
Is it entertainment?
It may not be ‘needed’ as much as a futuristic pillow that can quelsh your neck pain. Let’s for the purposes of this blog post, assume it does not meet a need, like music or film. (Yes we know your art is so good that everyone needs it, lol)
We believe some of these multi-million dollar tech projects have given entertainers (among others) a false sense of understanding when it comes to sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, leaving many of them thinking these platforms are more or less “money faucets”. Uh, wrong.
For all projects
How many people are on your newsletter or text subscription service? The number of people within reach like that (and not gated behind an algorithmic paywall) are a good reference for how many fans or subscribers you can reach.
Social media following and more importantly ENGAGEMENT. Followers you can fake. Engagement you can fake to some degree, but it’s pretty obvious when people are buying comments. Real comments that convey insight and/or understanding of the story are the bread and butter of an authentic project.
How many new unseen/unheard assets like photos, videos, new music do you have that you could use to make the project from and use to promote the project on social media.
What’s the STORY?
Did you make it through this numbered list with a smile or a shrug?
HERE ARE THE NUMBERS:
WHERE DO YOU FALL ON THIS CHART?
We looked at 10 recent music projects, all of which made between $8K-$38k. Here’s what they made and what their social media numbers look like. Since all of these happened recently, we can assume their social media and numbers here have not grown significantly.
Considering your own numbers, where do you find yourself on this chart?
Notes
We’re still chewing on the them, but nothing was glaringly obvious with these numbers. The artist with the highest amount raised appears to have about the highest numbers out of anyone on the list. It appears they have many more backers, which in this context, means more lower contributions were given. If you were to ask us, which of these numbers to focus on growing, we’d suggest the average (real) comments, like on Instagram.
These projects were chosen because they were the 10 most recently funded music projects over 9k.
These numbers may help you establish an understanding of where you need to be.
Considering some of the artists behind these projects have high Spotify listens and low Facebook followers & newsletter subscriptions, perhaps the takeaway there is to “play to your strengths”.
What’s missing
For some of these artists we were unable to grab certain pieces of information, like newsletter subscribers.
Ad budget, although we feel it’s safe to assume no significant ad budget was used. Let’s assume a maximum budget of $1k.
TikTok followers. Why? Because only 1 of these artists appears to have had an active TikTok account used as well in promotion.
Hey— you don’t have to do this alone! Contact us if you’re interested in hearing more about how we can help develop and optimize your project.