This site is a blog for musicians and music industry people. It is a free educational resource and it is also the way I advertise my music consulting services. I am an entertainment professional with deep roots in the music industry. Throughout my music career I have been a major label A&R representative, a music supervisor, an artist manager, a reality show producer, a bass player and the head of a digital record label.
Brian Meece is the CEO and co-founder of RocketHub, a platform that has helped thousands of artists and entrepreneurs further connect with their fans and brands, providing them with tools to help them raise funds and awareness for their creative projects. Brian is also a lifelong musician who continues to perform and record. A graduate of film school, he officially made his way to the music industry through creative media and creative arts. Brian started RocketHub when he began to see how powerful the community funding/crowdfunding model could be for artists across media and decided he wanted to create a company specifically geared towards artists that would educate, empower and support them as they worked get their creative projects off the ground.
Brian talked to me about how the crowdfunding model works and about the mission of RocketHub. He also shared some tips for artists that want to successfully harness the power of this fan funding model in order to build mutually-beneficial relationships with their fans and get their dream projects off the ground.
How did you get into the music industry and come up with the idea to start the RocketHub platform?
BM:
My background mostly before starting RocketHub was in creative media and creative arts. I went to undergrad for film and made some films. And I have been playing in bands since I was in high school. I recognized that in the world of indie filmmaking and the world of indie music, a lot of early adopters were gravitating towards a community funding model that we now know as the crowdfunding model. We were seeing it when Darren Aronofsky raised money for his first breakout movie Pi in the late ‘90s. He reached out to his community to raise about $60,000 and make that movie happen. It was the first time I had seen this phenomenon.
Then, years later, I saw Jill Sobule do a fan-funding campaign on her own and raise over $100,000. I recognized that this community funding model that we know as crowdfunding was something that was going to become part of the new media landscape. And I wanted to build a company that was artist friendly and would educate, empower and support artists and creative people looking to get funding and build awareness for their projects. So, that’s how RocketHub came to be.
And your official title is co-founder and CEO?
BM:
In the tech startup world there are a lot of CEOs out there. It’s important to note that it’s not just me, but the whole team behind RocketHub that are all also cut from a creative cloth. We all came together to build a company and organization that’s really supportive of the Arts and of the folks pursuing their dreams.
What is crowdfunding, and how does the RocketHub platform work?
BM:
Crowdfunding is an online event that harnesses a community for funding, awareness and feedback. This event has a beginning, a middle and end to it. It’s very different from the standard ecommerce play where you open up a store and sell stuff online. And it’s different from a donation play where there’s an online tip jar. Crowdfunding is very much an event that galvanizes communities to participate within a very specific amount of time.
The way our platform works is that an artist comes to RocketHub, uploads the title of their project and what they’re looking to do – whether it’s recording an album, a music video, doing a tour or something along those lines. And they’ll typically have a pitch video talking about themselves, their passion for the project, and a detailed project description. Then, they’ll set a goal amount – what they’re looking to raise. Most music projects we’ve seen are between $2,000 and $10,000. We’ve had other projects raise tens of thousands of dollars and some raise over $100,000. But, most music projects raise in that $2,000 – $10,000 range. And they usually accomplish this goal in between 60 and 90 days. On the project page, there’s also a rewards menu that outlines what funders get in exchange for their financial contributions. For example, they might get a digital download of the album for $10 or a physical CD that’s signed with a memento for $20. They may get a bundle or another cool experience for $50. And it scales up. We’ve seen donations of $100 and even $1,000 or $5,000 come in for certain projects. If the reward is really exciting, and the fan base is there to support the project, it can be a cool and interesting way to monetize communities based on these different levels of support.
You said something interesting to me the other day. You mentioned you really weren’t selling music and the final product as much as you were selling an experience.
BM:
Yes. We really are selling the experience. This funding model is about the relationship that these funders – and we call them “fuelers” on RocketHub – have with the artist/person spearheading the project. It’s about the relationship that those fuelers have with this creative person and that they have with each other – their ability to connect and communicate. It’s really about how fans participate with the funding, how they connect with the artist and the other funders and what they get back in exchange for the financial contribution. It’s a very different phenomenon from just going to the store or downloading something. It’s very impactful when done correctly.
The music projects on RocketHub make up about 25 percent of all the projects that come through the site. And we have a really high hit rate for music projects. Many musicians already have loyal fan bases and are already communicating with fans in ways that they weren’t doing ten years ago. A lot of projects can get made with 50-100 people, because the average contribution to music projects on the site is a little over $60. So, you can go back into the project budget and say, “Okay, if I need $6,000, that’s a little over 100 people I need to say ‘yes’ to this project.” And that’s very doable for a lot of emerging artists that are looking to take the next step with their careers by getting a tour or an album or music video out.
It’s really exciting to see music and crowdfunding fitting together so well.
I’m the kind of guy who struggled to even ask people to sponsor me when I ran a marathon. Do you find that there is some sort of acclimation process involved in the process of getting people comfortable with the idea of asking their peers for donations? How would you advise people to get past that mental hurdle?
BM:
First of all, I don’t really like to look at this as a “donation” model. You want to push the “trade,” not the “aid” angle. And the “trade” angle is where the rewards come in. Also, we’re artists, not charities. We’re asking for support and contributions. But we’re also offering something to our network. We’re offering cool rewards and scarce experiences. That’s really what the campaign should be about: “Here’s what I’m up to. Here’s why I’m doing it. And here’s what you can get if you come along for the ride.” When you frame your campaign around that type of communication, you get a lot better response than you do if you say, “Hey, I need money for this.”
For example, I ran my own campaign. And I can tell you, it takes a little bit of commitment and a little bit of gusto to get it together and put a project out to the world. It’s a little scary. But what I really enjoyed about it was that it gave me an excuse to reach out to people that I hadn’t talked to or seen in a while. I said, “Here’s what I’m up to, just FYI. Here’s what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. If you’re interested in this – and I hope you are – here’s how you can become a part of it. If you’re intrigued, come join the tribe.” And that communication really worked well with my audience. I have a hunch it would also work well with a lot of other artists’ audiences.
That “trade, not aid” mantra gets us, as artists, out of the mindset of fundraising or asking for tips or donations; because that’s really not what crowdfunding is about. It’s patronage meets commerce – a new spin on an old idea. I like to say, “Beethoven, plus social media equals crowdfunding.” What I mean by that is, it’s the old idea of patronage meets this new concept of being connected to a massive amount of people; crowdfunding is really just mass patronage. It’s pretty cool to see this idea of patronage reemerge on top of social media.
Yeah. It’s wonderful.
I often find that musicians, myself included, get ahead of ourselves pretty often and place the cart before the horse in a lot of situations. My inclination with setting up a crowdfunding campaign would be to say, “I put a band together, and we had one rehearsal. Now, let’s raise some money!” Because I don’t have any patience. When is the right time in a musician’s career for this type of crowdfunding campaign? Is there a baseline amount of fans or activity a band should realize before embarking on this type of project?
BM:
I would say that crowdfunding works for artists at a lot of different levels. So, it depends on what you’re trying to raise. The band you just described that has been jamming in a garage for a month or two may not be ready to raise $10,000 – $12,000 to do a big double LP. But they will very likely be able to raise $1,000 – $1,500 to go do a little demo EP or to do a higher-end show to premiere the band.
If you’re an emerging artist, I’d say, be realistic with your goals. And know that the average contribution to music projects is about $60. So, to raise $1,000 you need 20-30 people to say “yes” to a project, which is not really a lot. Just be reasonable in what you want to raise based on where you are in your creative journey. We’ve found that emerging artists that are just looking to start something raised $500 – $1,500. We’ve seen mid-level artists raise $5,000, plus. And we’ve seen larger, working artists that everyone may have heard of raise significantly more. It really just depends on where you are in your career. But you need to be aware that there is a strategy involved. If an emerging artist tries to raise $10,000, it’s going to be a lot tougher.
I know not every campaign is successful. From the vantage point of someone who sees thousands of these campaigns start up on RocketHub, which specific qualities do the artists that are successful at crowdfunding tend to have?
BM:
A successful RocketHub campaign typically has three core components. The first is an awesome project spearheaded by awesome people with passion. Believe it or not, just the fact that you’re making a record, a music video or planning a tour is not enough. It really needs to be as awesome as you can make it. The project doesn’t have to be really big either; it can be something really cool on a small scale. But as an artist, you just have to make it as awesome as you can and be front and center and have your band’s personality, or the creative team’s personality be front and center.
The second component you need in order to be successful is some sort of audience or network to start the campaign to. Obviously, the bigger the network, the more successful a campaign will be. But a lot of projects are funded through small communities. 20, 30, 50 or 100 people can add up significantly with a crowdfunding campaign. You want to have some kind of fan base to start. It doesn’t have to be massive.
The third thing you need in order to run a successful crowdfunding campaign is cool rewards. The $20 level is most popular one for music. It’s the single-most popular price point. But the average – the mien – is a little over $60. So, you want to make sure you also have a cool $50 reward and cool $100, $250, $500 and even $1,000 and $5,000 rewards, just in case you get a big-ticket player that wants to jump in.
Those are really the three core components we find successful projects have: 1) an awesome mission spearheaded by awesome people; 2) that fan base/audience that’s connected to them; 3) cool rewards to offer in exchange for the financial contribution. Those three things together are the Holy Grail.
The tiered model is always an interesting one. I was fortunate enough to work with Jill Sobule – who you mentioned earlier – when I was at Lava Records. For a $10,000 contribution, she actually offered the reward of being allowed to sing on her record. And somebody did it. And I don’t know if he ever sold any of these, but the drummer Josh Freese came up with a list of tiered rewards. And one of the upper echelons was, “Do mushrooms with me and the guys from Tool.” I don’t know if that’s something you’d want to advise, but it’s an interesting take on the model.
BM:
Well, and also, the RocketHub team loves helping artists. We love educating them on how to run campaigns and giving them a little feedback when they need it. As a team, we’re very accessible to artists. If you’re an artist, you shouldn’t look at the platform as just a website. The people behind it – myself included – are really passionate about helping artists raise funds and awareness.
There are a few crowdfunding sites out there, including Kickstarter and PledgeMusic. Why do you think artists should choose RocketHub?
BM:
We share this space with a variety of different companies. And overall, that’s a really good thing. Having some choice in the overall market stimulates demand for the entire industry. I think the biggest way we’re different because we’re always looking to add value for our creative users.
I think RocketHub has some technical differences as well as some softer-touch differences. In terms of technical differences, on RocketHub you don’t have to reach the full funding amount in order to unlock your funds like you do on some of our competitors’ platforms. So, if a musician sets a goal of $15,000 and raises $9,000 or $10,000, they’ll be able to walk away with funds – minus their credit card fees and RocketHub fees.
We’ve found that RocketHub is a great platform for creatives looking to make their projects happen and that are committed to making their projects happen, because they can aim high and still have a safety net if they don’t raise all their funds. On some of the other platforms, you can run a campaign, raise $8,000 or $9,000 of a $15,000 goal, and walk away with nothing because you didn’t hit the full funding amount. We want to really be artist friendly in that regard.
Another way we’re different is that we allow artists to launch projects from around the world. Some of our competitors don’t do that.
We also are looking to add value beyond the funding campaign. So, if you look at the front page of the RocketHub site now, you’ll see one of our Launchpad products. It’s basically a publicity firm in New York that’s going to give a month-long publicity campaign to an artist on RocketHub. These opportunities we open up are free to our creative users that have successfully funded on RocketHub. And we’re going to be doing more and more of that – trying really get exposure and extra awareness for artists that are doing special things on our site.
To learn more about Brian Meece and how his crowdfunding platform helps artists, check out the RocketHub website.
Rob Max is the Communication Director for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, an organization that provides financial assistance to career musicians who are facing Illness, disability or age related problems. Prior to working at Sweet Relief Rob was a musician, the manager / promoter of a music venue and ran a record store.
Start me out and tell me about your early music career.
RM:
After graduating the University of Maryland in the mid 80s I went into industrial and commercial real estate at a company in North Jersey. While II was doing that in my early 20’s, I got together with some friends of mine, and we started playing. I was a singer, and I also did percussion. A good buddy of mine and I formed a band called The Rain, and we were doing a lot of rock and roll covers, anything from Cream, to the Grateful Dead, to Pink Floyd, to Dylan, to The Band, and trying to create our own original music. We performed locally, we did parties, we did a couple small festivals they were called back then – nothing like what we have now. I think that band probably was around for maybe a year and it morphed into something with some other guys in a band that had just split up. We started practicing with them, and we were expanding our repertoire a little bit and trying to do more originals. After we had been together about five months and were playing some Dead stuff, I think it was at a party – I can’t remember exactly because this was taking place in about ’89, 20 years ago. We played a party and played some Dead tunes, and an individual saw us. There’s a group of folks called the Wharf Rats that follow the Grateful Dead and used to do 12-step meetings at the shows.
Someone from the Wharf Rats said, “Listen, we’re doing a party at the Wetlands in New York City, and we’d like you guys to play.” I guess the caveat was that we had to play Grateful Dead songs. We only knew about six songs, and we had about 60 days before the event, and we ended up learning another 20 songs. We hadn’t named ourselves yet, so we decided to name ourselves Crazy Fingers. We played this event, and they had a ton of people there. We weren’t anything like a Dark Side Orchestra, and we certainly weren’t as note for note as bands like Zen Trickster or any of the other bands that were playing back then; but we had some great, young musicians and I could do enough vocalizations to get a Bobby sound or a Jerry sound out. After we played the show, we ended up speaking to the Wetlands manager and the guy who was booking the show.
From that show they asked us if we wanted to be one of their regular Dead bands. They were doing a Tuesday night Dead Center, and they asked us to be a house band doing regular Dead Center nights. We did, and it was a great experience. We used to bounce around; there were guys like John Popper hanging out there all the time – Blues Traveler hadn’t hit yet – and Phish was around, and they hadn’t hit yet, Dave Matthews wasn’t big yet. These were some of the other folks that were playing that we’d hung out with.
I’m sure Chris from the Spin Doctors was also around.
RM:
That was the next word out of my mouth. Chris from the Spin Doctors. We weren’t anywhere near their creativity doing Grateful Dead music, but we did start working on some of our originals. And we did that for a number of years, and it was a great experience. I left my job and was playing full time. As any musician trying to get gigs, how do you survive? I caddied golf bags. I lived in New Jersey and a Country Club wasn’t far away. I could work four or five hours, make $100 and not have to do anything else. God knows I didn’t want to work at a company or a corporation. I grew my hair, and we had a great time. We developed a terrific following. I think like a lot of bands discover, our greatest gigs were local gigs out in New Jersey. We played at a church. We used to call it “Methodist Square Garden.” We would make two, three four times the amount of money we could make playing in clubs.
By creating your own venue?
RM:
Exactly, and that’s one of the things I can recommend for people coming up in bands, don’t knock yourself out always trying to get into the clubs. It certainly will get you seen and develop a following, but if you’re trying to survive, develop a regular monthly gig or two in your own area where you control it. The church loved us, all the kids were going there, and obviously there was no booze served, all our fans were all high school kids. But we would pack the place, and we got to do our own shows, and we had effects and smoke machines and projectors showing King Kong behind us. We could get a thousand bucks or more for a gig like that. At a club like the Wetlands the best nights they paid were going to be $500-$600. We’ve oscillated between playing clubs or we’d go up to Port Chester and someone would be doing a festival.
Did you ever make the jump from being a cover band to playing all originals?
RM:
No. We never got to make that jump. We couldn’t get into many venues doing other things. We happened to break at the right time doing Dead music. If you recall, that was the third coming of The Dead and the Touch of Grey era. If you were a Dead fan and going to shows, an entirely new group of teenagers were going to shows because of A Touch of Grey. The whole hit that came out, and we benefitted from that. Clubs that wouldn’t talk to us about playing what we wanted to play, it was popular for that era, from late 1988 to early 1992. It was a lot of fun, and there was never any point in time that I made enough money where I didn’t have to work another job, but on the East coast caddying golf bags was probably the most freedom you could have, and it worked out at that time to probably about $20-$25 per hour of earning money.
So you went from being a musician to running a record store to managing a music venue?
RM:
The whole band thing and that ran its course so I had to make some decisions – was I going to do music? What was I going to do? I wanted to write and still stay around entertainment and music so with a bunch of other guys I moved to California and we all landed in Laguna Beach, CA. The managing director of Sweet Relief actually used to manage the band I was in and both he and I ended up working in management and sales and development for Warehouse Entertainment. It was like a Blockbuster/Sam Goody combination. They had a whole music and movie section, and we both ended up managing locations. I managed a record store on the pier in Huntington Beach, CA. And from there, that was a stint for a couple years.
Those were crazy days. It was the CD boom, and the music industry was thriving. I used to have local bands play at the store. We would set them up on the pier out there and hide the power cord, then all of a sudden it was like those flash mobs. Out of nowhere all of a sudden without permission from corporate, I would just start having live bands play out on the pier at Huntington Beach. A huge crowd would come and the cops would show up; and they’d be trying to find the cord to pull the plug, and they couldn’t find it. We had a lot of fun back then.
So that was my experience working in the retail record world; and then from there I ended up going to the White House Restaurant and Tavern in Laguna Beach, which had a venue on one side and a restaurant on the other. I became the general manager and entertainment coordinator as well as the sound guy and the tech guy, and booked live music there seven nights a week for four to five years. And that was when I kind of saw the other side of it – bands constantly trying to get gigs, and how difficult it was, and how little we paid. We typically paid $400-$500, and it didn’t matter if you had four in your band; I had full-stage bands with ten people. I used to say to myself, “These people love music so much that they’re schlepping from Los Angeles to play a gig in Laguna Beach on a Thursday night with a ten-piece band, horns and back-up singers and they’re making $30 per person.
Probably less when you figure in expenses.
RM:
Yes. And I really got an appreciation. I certainly had passion for music but my talent was marginal at best, and I didn’t have that kind of drive. I got to see for five years all these bands that constantly were trying to get on the stage and would work for literally nothing. We’d serve them a meal as well, and they’d show up there early and play their hearts out. Some nights we were packed with three- or four-hundred people, other nights there’d be ten people.
Other than talent, what got your attention as a guy booking a club? What was it that made you take a band under your wing and try to develop them?
RM:
The bands that got played were those that were willing to do work to get people into the club. That was always the bottom line, and nine out of ten bands were always unwilling to do that.
I know this was before the digital age, so what did that entail back then?
RM:
It entailed street work. Back then people had paper mailing lists, but it would entail flyering wherever they lived locally and getting on the phone. If they wanted to get the gig and keep the gig they would have to make sure their first night there they did well. Typically what happened is bands did do well their first nights and their second night they bombed. I think what we’ve all seen in the music biz is that even your best fans will come out for you once, but if you don’t really have die-hard fans they may not show up the second time. Certainly with the level of bands we were dealing with which were more club bands, they weren’t focused on writing their original music per se, it wasn’t really a performance artist club, they really couldn’t back it up the second time.
What did the artists that made that transition do that the other artists did not?
RM:
Somebody in the band had the driving business skills required to be successful at having people show up. There was at least one person in the band – sometimes it was the leader, sometimes it was the drummer – that didn’t work another job and was willing all day and all night to pitch the band and get people to show up and get the word out. That was always the difference between the bands where I could see nobody was really driven or they shrugged their shoulders and didn’t know why anybody never came and the bands with at least one motivated person that this was their life – playing and getting other people to come see them. That was the key.
So you were there for five years. What was next and how did you get to Sweet Relief?
RM:
What was next was interesting. I ended up meeting a terrific young lady, and we got married and had a son during my last year there. And I said, “This world is not going to work for me.” I wanted to be an attentive dad, and I was doing the night club thing until three or four in the morning. So after some long and hard thought and doing a little investigating, I took a complete right turn, cut all my hair off – at that point I had hair down my back – and got in touch with an old friend from high school who had been in the commercial insurance back in New York City.
One of the things I think is always important for musicians and not something that Sweet Relief promotes but from my own perspective, I kept educating myself in the music business when I had a band. I made sure I didn’t miss the curve of the Internet and computers and all the skill sets that come along with that. I always kept up with my current events and news reading, not just necessarily looking for the skills where an opportunity would come up, but it made sense to me. Again, I wasn’t the kind of driven artist who focuses on their music. I was more the person who loved it but was a little more realistic. Through a number of conversations, a friend of mine asked me to come to New York and help him start a new business. He was starting an insurance agency that catered to the technology world. We started that company and we ended up selling it two years later to a larger company. I then got hired by another startup that was starting a digital Internet play in the commercial insurance business and became the director of that company. As my bio says on Sweet Relief, I grew that from twenty agents to a 4,000-client, $50-million-per-year enterprise; and it was a big change from music.
I would say so.
RM:
It was a big change, and it was really exciting for the first three years. Then, I just got bored. I was still a long-haired musician beach guy wearing a suit and guy and commuting into New York City every day at five in the morning. It just wore on me. This will get me into Sweet Relief. My good buddy Bill Bennett contacted me the summer before last and had just been approached with this opportunity to be involved with Sweet Relief. He asked me if I would be interested in helping him shepherd the growth of the charity. A year later I jumped in with Bill, and we’ve been trying to grow Sweet Relief into a substantial resource for musicians around the country.
Tell me in your words, what is Sweet Relief?
RM:
Sweet Relief Musicians Fund is a national charity designated 501(c)3, and Sweet Relief’s mission is to provide financial assistance for career musicians – there must be a level of professionalism in someone’s musicianship – that are facing disability, illness or age-related problems. That’s the mission and is exactly what we do. I love the fact that our mission – I’ve read other missions that say, “Well, we have a goal to create something …” – that is completely specific. We raise money to help musicians that are in trouble because of disability, illness or age-related problems and we do it a lot of different ways.
I guess speak to me about the climate. I think a lot of being in music as you’ve experienced is, “I’m going to be young forever and going to have monster hit after monster hit.” But with the way the business has changed and certain revenue streams have dried up, I’m guessing there’s probably an endless need for people living on royalty checks who have fallen on hard times as things have changed, as well as of course – I’m afraid to generalize – but musicians are not always great about managing their money and planning ahead.
RM:
You hit on two key things. There is a segment of the musicians who had successful professional careers, and now the atmosphere of today’s business segment of music has dried up on them. But the other point you hit on is, we deal with a lot – probably a majority – of musicians who were kind of in the world that I came from. They had a band or played professionally – maybe it was jazz, maybe it was orchestral, and I don’t include myself in this group – and were going to be musicians no matter what. They didn’t leave to go become an insurance guy. They stuck with it.
One of the ten people in the band that made $30 / night after driving forever in a van.
RM:
Exactly. And they’re still in it, and they play locally in Memphis, Oakland and wherever it is. And maybe they’re the local bar band that plays five nights a week, and they survive that way. They might have a part-time job or do something else, but those are the folks that if something goes wrong, they are really in big trouble. They don’t always have relationships to reach out to other musicians and get an assist.
No 401K, no pension, anything.
RM:
Yeah. For every musician that played on a stage like an arena, there are hundreds that have never got into that, yet are professional musicians, and that’s all they’ve done their whole life. That’s really the largest group of our constituency – the people that decided to play music, and when they get sick, they’re in trouble. And maybe they get income from being teachers of music, maybe they also work at a club at the door. They might have variable things where they get some income, but their sole direction is always been music. Some of the die-hard artists their 20’s don’t have health insurance, but sometimes as they get into their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, they’re still in that same kind of position. Typically the only time I see these die-hards change is when what happened to me happens to them – they have children. And then they realize, “I can’t just bounce around from couches or cots. I’m in the position where I’m responsible to another human being.” And then they will typically start to pursue something where they can provide. But that not being the case, musicians can find themselves in a tough spot when they are ill or hurt.
How can people help?
RM:
Bands that are not yet on the national stage – they can help us tremendously. We’ve done numerous gigs this year where bands put on a show and they’ve raised $200, $300, $400 or $500. Not only did they get that opportunity to contribute and help other musicians, but we’ve also provided some national notoriety; we’ve put it up on our website and if it makes sense, we’ll put out a PR piece about it, and that will bring awareness to an audience of maybe 100 or 200. We’re always looking for musicians that want to take one of our gigs and make us a beneficiary. And if they go to our website, they’ll see my e-mail and our phone number, and they can call me directly. I love to hear from them, and we’ll try to contribute everything we can to make an event a success, or if there are other ways they want to contribute.
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