Crowdfund Cover Song Music Videos with Song Backer
Song Backer is a new platform for funding music videos of cover songs. It's basically a form of crowdfunding that leverages the popularity of cover song videos on YouTube. Song Backer feels a bit awkward in this early stage but is potentially a strong contender if they can attract musicians with healthy followings on YouTube. Believe it or not this looks like a viable niche for a music tech startup despite a growing amount of related activity.
Cover Songs Are A Popular Creative Approach To Brand Building
Cover songs on YouTube have been a starting point for a great number of musicians some of whom have gone on to focus on their original music. Examples include Pomplamoose, Lennon and Maisy and Karmin.
Pomplamoose's Jack Conte built on his YouTube fame to create Patreon which supports creative activities including music videos by subscription.
Loudr also works with cover song artists providing licensing and sales but they don't help license cover song music videos because that's a more difficult process than simply licensing audio. Solveig Whittle has more on the surprisingly difficult task of licensing music for a cover song video.
There's also now an extensive history of crowdfunding music in the form of albums or other special projects but nobody's really focused on crowfunding individual music videos.
Song Backer Helps You Fund Your Cover Song Music Videos
Song Backer is designed to allow musicians to establish an ongoing presence, have fans vote on songs to be covered and then cover the cost through crowdfunding.
While traditional crowdfunding platforms focus on the campaign, often funding a whole album, Song Backer focuses on the musicians with an ongoing stream of single song campaigns or "backables."
This approach makes sense but feels a little off as presented. For example, you can see a homepage widget for Mysti Mayhem that shows the progress of her current campaign but you have to click through to her account page and find out what song is being funded over in the sidebar.
It's an interesting problem given that each campaign is assumed to be more modest than crowdfunding campaigns tend to be and will be one of many. But part of the pull is the particular song so featuring that more prominently might help the specific campaign especially for those just getting started.
Song Backer's still in the early stages of development with only a handful of artists involved. But you can sign up now and check things out.
Song Backer only gets paid for successful campaigns. When a campaign or "backable" is successful, the artist gets paid immediately via PayPal minus PayPal's percentage and Song Backer's 15%.
You can get a better sense of what the folks at Song Backer are trying to do from this recent blog post and then dig into the details in their help section.
More:
- How To License A Cover Song For A Music Video
- Loudr's Cover Song Licensing and Sales Platform Opens To New Signups For VidCon Relaunch
- Jack Conte's Patreon Unlocks SuperFan Revenue Streams For Web Stars
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (Twitter/Facebook) is building a writing hub at Flux Research. To suggest topics about music tech, DIY music biz or music marketing for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
