Musical Micro-financing
For some time now, Calabash Music, an online vendor of international music and a former employer of yours truly, has been shopping around its micro-financing platform for musicians that don’t have the funds to cut a record themselves. Now, Calabash is in the final round of an Ideablob contest that could give them the funding needed to get the idea off the ground. The idea, “Tune Your World,” from Calabash’s page:
Every artist has the same problem of obtaining capital for their next recording. Tune Your World provides the solution of applying micro-financing to the music industry. Our groundbreaking approach is the creation of peer-to-peer micro-financing of new music projects - enabling fans to deliver start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries. Tune Your World operates on a people-to-people model. Musicians obtain funding for new recordings directly from their fans without giving up ownership or control. Our mission is to revitalize the music industry in places where the music industry has never worked very well.
While I did indeed work for Calabash, my opinions on this idea stand separately from my personal relationship with the company. Micro-financing has worked all over the world in many different industries, and while some sites like Sellaband have tried to bring it to western audiences, Calabash is the first company to implement it in places where the mainstream music industry has failed the most. With a business model that makes sense for the consumer and the artist, I encourage you to visit Calabash’s Ideablob page and vote to help them achieve their goal.
