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New artists embrace online to promote music from the start
Photo credit: Urbanite
Bulletproof Messenger has the most investors — 1,171 "believers" — on the crowd funding site SellaBand.
By Ryan Bonner
Special to amNewYork
Mr. Ozwald, aka Kyle Jekielek, tried to build a fan base for his music the old-fashioned way: selling CDs on city streets.
Now, he’s learned the art of online promotion. Ozwald, as he likes to be called, is trying to make it big using the route that so many new artists are trudging, generating fans through social network sites, giving away music free online and more recently using Twitter.
If Ozwald, 26, gives away his music, then maybe his next show downtown is that much more popular.
“You pay attention to your fan base,” Ozwald said. “People aren’t going to pay for music, but they may pay 10 or 20 bucks to see a show. It’s important to give yourself as many avenues as possible to expose yourself to more people.”Another emerging revenue generator for musicians is SellaBand, which facilitates crowd funding — harnessing groups of people who invest small amounts of money to finance a venture. In the case of music, investors finance albums and get a piece of the profits. This way they’re also incentivized to blog, tweet and hawk the group online.
Bulletproof Messenger, a Long Island-based rock band, rounded up the most investors — 1,171 “believers” — on SellaBand.
“We knew we had a good first album so we weren’t surprised when people put their money where their mouth was,” said Matt Litwin, the DJ and programmer of Bulletproof.
When the band hit the target $50,000, it hit the studio and finished recording its latest album, “Arm Yourself,” in January.
Other striving artists, who see the shift in the industry, recognize that technology may have taken away some avenues to riches, but it has opened others.
Anamanaguchi, a city-based electronic band comprised of four college buddies, tweets, leaks its music online and fully embraces the Internet model of success.
“As new tools come up, we try to get involved in as many ways as possible,” said the band’s guitarist, Peter Berkman, 20. “We grew up with all of this technology.”
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