Music takes a back seat to fundraising

Three months ago I had never heard of Kickstarter, the website where you can raise funds for a creative project. Today I stand exposed as someone who miserably failed to raise a budget of $21,000 to make a CD with my band, AfroJersey. A once celebrated contributor to my profession, I am the artist formerly known as “one of The Roches.” Like so many folks my age (I’m 59), I’ve found that the horse I was riding slipped out from underneath me at some point in the last 10 years. I was not asleep for this, merely busy trying to mine the murky depths of my mind for song ideas.

Today the job description has vastly changed. Recently I was talking to a friend who teaches geniuses at the top music school in the city. He told me of one student who failed his music theory exam because, he explained, “I’ve been busy networking.” I could relate.

Asking people to contribute to my project at first seemed like fun. I wrote thousands of emails to friends, both Facebook and Otherwise. (We really need a word for friends made outside of Facebook. “Otherwise” seems an awfully dismissive way to describe a relationship that requires the parties be present.) I was thrilled as first-responders offered up their credit card numbers to a strange website in order to show me that they cared. It seemed like a huge improvement over the days when I sat in record company boardrooms with “product managers” who’d been assigned to give me a “makeover” as a last resort before dropping me from their labels.

Along with contributors, however, came a wave of e-mails with sad tales of illnesses, lost jobs and stock-market horror stories. When I ended up donating to an M.S. walk on behalf of one man’s ailing wife, I could see that I needed to apply discipline and not deplete my own bank account while trying to raise money for the Afro-Jersey CD.

Emailing people and checking for contributions quickly became my main job. Songwriting and music practice went onto the back burner. My Kickstarter campaign raised $8,700, but with Kickstarter you must raise your entire goal or none of the pledges are yours.

Songwriting and practicing give way to fund-raising in today’s music business

I switched to another fundraising site, Indiegogo, where you could collect whatever you raised. That campaign just ended with $4,400 in the pot. Out of this, 9 percent goes to Indiegogo, 25 percent to the IRS and about $800 to the manufacturing and shipping out of rewards promised to donors. As our sinking ship breathes its last gasp, both Kickstarter and Indiegogo continue to send me updates titled “Projects We Love” about other projects that have raised three times the amount of their goal.

In a recent interview, Woody Allen revealed the astonishing fact that he has never sent or received an email. It occurred to me that there are only two types of people alive today who have the luxury of indulging themselves in this manner: the very, very wealthy and the homeless. In the age of “Occupy” divisiveness, it’s nice to see a common ground between those two groups.

– © 2012 The New York Times, Courtesy: New York Times Syndicate