Singer Jill Sobule was one of the more high profile musicians to successfully embrace a crowdfunded album using a tiered approach, successfully raising the money for her last album in less than two months. Sobule was kind enough to participate in our own CwF+RtB experience and even wrote up a nice guest post for us as well. In talking with both her and her manager, what came through was that the two of them really were working hard to understand this new world and how to thrive in it — so I’ve been excited to see what they would come up with next. Of course, that’s a bit misleading, because Jill’s been constantly communicating and connecting with her fans via various social networking platforms, but now she’s launching a small scale, but fun experiment in recording her next album: which is that she’s selling a very limited number of tickets to spend time in the studio with her and John Doe (and apparently some surprise backing musicians).
What’s cool is that the different ticket offerings are well targeted for different types of fans. There’s an all day pass for musicians who want to experience the entire process of making a professional album. There’s a “creative patron” level that skips the morning setup, but picks up with the afternoon session, and finally there’s a “music lovers” level that focuses on just the actual recording part. The goal of the offering by itself isn’t to get rich, but to add some cool, valuable, scarce reasons to buy that also serve to better connect with fans. It seems like a cool experiment, and I’ll be excited to see how it turns out.
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