Published December 29th 2015
This year, February 2015 to be exact, TLC raised a massive $430,000 from fans to record one more album. A few months after, De La Soul also raised their budget of over $600,000 for a new album through the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. After that, it’s been pretty quiet, so what’s been happening since?
De La Soul has been making progress
For De La Soul this will be their first album in 12 years and they are highly motivated to make this a successful project, so they have made loads of progress.
The trio has called in the troops and lined up a lot of famous cameos for the upcoming album. So far Snoop Doggy Dogg, Usher, Little Dragon, Pete Rock, 2 Chainz, David Byrne, Damon Albarn, Roc Marciano and Estelle have been linked to the project.
Collaborations are considered a learning curve by the group, rather than a marketing strategy. However, at the time of their Kickstarter fundraise launch, they also used the help of famous friend, by releasing this track with Nas as a little incentive.
In November the group let their 11,000 backers know that the album, even though it’s yet untitled, has gotten a release date: April 29th 2016. They would also release a single, “Train Wreck”, this month… It’s December 29th 2015, so officially they still have two days.
TLC have had a bumpier ride
Over 4,000 backers pledged their money for the last TLC album at the beginning of the year, with the a promise of a release in October. They were updated about the project right up to the summer, but that’s when things got quiet.
Finally, in November an update was given that clearly sounded like the group were still in the very early stages of the project. They were still setting up the team of people to work with and the album’s release date got pushed back to 2016.
By then, TLC fans had already openly expressed their impatience with the group on social media. The group was quick to respond and called the critics “misinformed”, but it did put the girls back on track. Some investors suddenly received some T-Shirts and others were taken out on the town.
The downside to cutting out the executive?
I don’t know about TLC, but De La Soul have been pretty clear they are walking this road of crowdfunding in an attempt to keep creative control over their music. They have chosen not to get an executive on their case and even indicated so in their Kickstarter launch.
Even though it looks like the group has an incredible focus and ability to keep the project going, you could take the delay in the single release, and I know they still have two days, as a sign of a missing project manager.
It´s a great idea to cut the executives out of the creation process, but they do also push the artists and other creatives to meet their deadlines. The process of creating music is rarely finished. There’s always room for improvement and, as an artist, you can get so stuck in this.
Artists do need someone to tell them to make decisions, because the clock is ticking and everyone wants the music to come out. The artist will always hate the person who does this, because they know creating something beautiful takes time and it doesn’t work on a schedule. It’s just so unfortunate that the whole world works on a schedule.
To that regard, fans turning into investors are not at all different from the industry’s business people. The risk with crowdfunded albums, I think, is that the fans will feel entitlement and ownership in the project and its results. Because of this they will act the exact same way the people in the business do. If you’re late, they’ll tell you. If they don’t like the results, they’ll turn on you.
Kickstarter itself is not too worried about it all. They are aggressively going to target the crowdfunding of music projects in 2016 and have just hired their first Head of Music.
