A picture from our show last night in Bethlehem. Great night to play. Intense night to live
Photo Cred Marissa D’Elia
Secret Plot last night in Bethlehem
Chris Lafferty: Ugh! »
Sick of bands using Kickstarter! Being in a band and ‘doing it yourself’ doesn’t mean begging others for money, so you can then charge said others again for the vinyl once it’s out.
IMPORTANT. Yesterday I saw a kickstarter which was for pressing vinyl. I mean. Guys. Get a…
Still true. The amount of people who are apologists for this still completely baffle me. It’s like, if you cover the process up with enough high-five super posi images and enough people think the bands involved are “good bros”, a scary amount of people will roll over and ignore what is really going on here. At the lowest end of the scale it’s fetishising the cultivation of hype under the guise of working collectively - which it simply isn’t, it’s people who cannot be bothered to do things equitably taking advantage of the kindness/naivety of people who are nice enough to enjoy their band. At worst, it is straight up exploitative and over-charging for things that shouldn’t be monetised. Commodifying a hand-written thank you note or a tweet? Suck out. It elevates supposedly DIY records to a novelty product rather than a collective endeavour where money is recycled to a greater extent as possible. I still think the absolute fundamental fact is, if you as a ‘punk’ band have the audience big enough to achieve sizeable kickstarter funding, you ironically have an audience big enough to recoup expenditure on a DIY release through…actually selling your records. Not elevating yourself to minor celeb status via selling hangouts or monetising the words “thank you” scrawled on the back of a piece of paper. And if you don’t have the up-front capital to do that on your own, then you still have enough interest to legitimately have DIY labels interested who will help share that burden. It’s true because that is what is happening every single day, continues to occur and has been happening fairly since before I was born. If you have enough people willing to chuck you more than a 7” record is worth at unit price before it even exists for the sake of some special contact from the band, then you can be pretty assured that the same person will buy the very same record in physical form when it comes out. And if a band is aware of that yet still does it, then I cannot understand why anyone would see it as legitimate. It’s crass, misleading and for lack of a better word, bullshit.
It’s like Chris says, asking people to send you money and claiming a record as “free” is simply a full blown lie. Crowd sourcing itself is fine when done fairly and for projects that really justify an outlay of significant up-front capital. A DIY punk release simply does not fall into that category - and if you think it does then you are simply not bothering to look hard enough.
And for anyone who still has doubts as to why Kickstarter is a cop-out, James has put it way more eloquently than I could ^^
