Sellaband Files For Bankruptcy
UPDATED: The translation and content of the court document below has been verified by a Dutch contact familiar with the music and tech industries.
Artist funding platform Sellaband has been offline for several days with its front page declaring, "We're currently down for maintenance…we expect to be back up tomorrow by the end of the day."
But documents filed in an Amsterdam court yesterday show that the company has been declared insolvent, a Dutch legal status similar to bankruptcy in the U.S. An English translation of court documents reads simply:
The fate of funds being held for fan investors or for artists like Public Enemy, who were using the platform to raise funds for a new album or for fan investors is unclear. Company officials have not yet responded to an morning inquiry.
To me this always smelled like a scam.
A lot of people made some good records through them. Jill Sobule fans and supporters just raised $200,000 for her new record. Eeeek!
They weren’t a scam they were just badly managed. There’s a bunch of other sites doing the same thing better.
I’m gloating big time over this Chapter 7. What a scam of a company and I warned everyone here about a year ago. You reap what you sow! Good riddance.
Maybe the guys who started Sellaband weren´t crooks to begin with, just as once Madoff was a legit trader.
But the whole idea of raising capital of the public, without the proper controls of financial institutions , always smelled like a scam to me.
Can you give me examples of “other sites doing the same thing better”? Genuinely curious, as an artist.
See you later “Suckers”
B. Madoff and SellaBand Team
Jill developed her own site I believe. JillsNextRecord.Com Other sites that I believe are legit – http://www.artistshare.org & http://www.kickstarter.com
Dear Beni,
it was not a scam, I am an artist on it too, just raised 12% of my goal for the album.
We will see what happens,I am very serious about this matter
I would suggest that you use http://www.kickstarter.com or just raise funds on your own.
Why are so many of you assuming that these guys went down because they where in some way dishonest.
Is there any evidence to support that they did not just run out of funding and fail to prove their model?
If not then a better thing to do would be to mourn the death of yet another music initiative that did not make it. My starting assumption has to be that these guys where enthusiastic entrepreneurs working their fingers to the bone trying to make a vision become reality.
If there is no reason or foundation for this kind of speculation this reveals a paranoia that would be part of the explanation for their demise.
I don’t know much about sellaband, but the model has intrigued me for a while. I really hope that the money they were holding finds its way back to the artists that it belongs to. Maybe that is wishful thinking. In the end, we need to recognize that these guys brought this model into the spot light. If the model continues to work elsewhere than the future use of the concept will be, in part, thanks to them. I truly feel for those who may have lost money in this. Best of luck to you.
Tom Siegel
http://www.indieleap.com
Should there be more transparency with tech companies?
Any D2C will be in trouble shortly.
What really pisses me off about this is they had a good idea with a bad business execution. And in the end the bands won’t get paid and the fans that participated will now hesitate the next time an artist is exploring a direct line of support.
I run a music company. It’s hard. And it’s not easy making sure that the business will stay in business. Nimbit has worked hard to make sure artist’s get the money they earn through direct to fan sales. And we’ve been doing it for over six years. Companies like SellABand make it hard for those of us that have sold our youngest children just to make sure that our artists get paid!
We are going back to direct patronage of the Arts. It just makes sense. But you really don’t need a devoted provider to fund an album. You just need one place to manage your business, like Nimbit!
By the way Ellis Paul raised over 100K in donations to produce his last album and he did this directly through his Nimbit Storefronts, taking donations right along side selling his albums, merch etc…
I was under the impression that Jill had raised $70,000. She did it on her own. She didn’t use Sellaband and I have never had the $200,000 figure before.
Kickstarter is a good place to check.
Surely Sellaband was just a vehicle to keep “studios”, “producers” in a job … I can’t believe they even manufactured CD’s ($10,000) … WTF! … I’ve kept an eye on it since its inception, can’t believe it lasted this long … but I can’t figure out how it spent any money? … surely it was just a website and fixers for studios … good riddance!
Fortunately some great cd’s were made through Sellaband.
Check out these young guys of So What, made a great debut album. Will be playing at SXSW this March.
http://www.sowhat-music.nl
Internet is giving a lot of people the opportunity to reinvent the wheel. Most of these wheel re-inventors, simply ignore that the wheel is round because there was a long historic process of perfecting the wheel to its current shape. So they are try things like the oval wheel, the square wheel, etc… , that were long discarded , for being unpractical, or unsafe.
What Sellaband and other crowd-funding sites are doing is trying to reinvent the financial system. As we all know , it badly needs some reinvention, but when someone tries to make an experience with the financial equivalent of the square wheel, I have to doubt the seriousness of the whole enterprise.
Banks, funds , and the like must be seriously regulated, because they can very easily abuse the good faith of it´s depositors. Sellaband and the like, are a very iffy proposition, exactly because they created a model where they circumvent any state oversight.
A company that takes deposits from the public to invest on something ( a recording in this case) is a financial institution – thats what sellaband is , and to treat them like anything else is a mistake. They are not a music venture, they are a bank, or a fund and should be treated acordingly.