A few weeks ago I asked what people would think of a live Kingfisher album, and with the positive response we got we've started working on it in earnest. I made rough mixes, we listened through and picked our favorites, and we've started working with Dana to turn these into real tracks. This is going to cost money, though, and after talking to a bunch of musician friends it sounds like Kickstarter is still the best platform for this. So: consider backing our kickstarter?
What might this album cost? Some estimating:
$1,300 | Mixing so far |
$1,200 | Remaining mixing, plus mastering (??) |
$400 | CD Manufacturing |
$300 | Photography |
$200 | Copyrights |
$3,400 | Total |
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This is about half what the 2014 Free Raisins CD. There's no expense for the recording, because we recorded ourselves over the past year as we played dances. We're also planning on doing the art and graphic design ourselves as well.
One risk with raising money on Kickstarter is that if you don't hit your goal you don't get anything. We could potentially ask for a smaller amount, and try to make up the difference over time from sales at dances, though people are less into buying physical CDs than they used to be, and I haven't had much success selling digital goods in person. To figure out what sort of amounts might be realistic I tried to gather the Kickstarters from as many contra dance bands as I could find. I pulled together:
Year | Band | Goal | Raised | Backers |
---|---|---|---|---|
2012 | Trip to Nelson | $1,000 | $1,200 | 28 |
2015 | Nova | $6,750 | $7,980 | 194 |
2015 | The Ripples | $3,500 | $3,840 | 74 |
2016 | Toss the Possum | $4,600 | $5,705 | 97 |
2017 | Great Bear | $7,000 | $10,111 | 239 |
2017 | Buddy System | $7,000 | $7,527 | 186 |
2018 | Stringrays | $10,000 | $14,696 | 295 |
2018 | Countercurrent | $4,500 | $5,121 | 104 |
2019 | Nova | $8,500 | $9,831 | 197 |
2020 | Buddy System | $12,000 | $13,185 | 260 |
2020 | Back Porch Cafe | $1,800 | $2,119 | 63 |
2020 | Pete's Possee | $6,000 | $6,837 | 127 |
2021 | Celticladda | $2,970 | $4,276 | 69 |
2022 | Syncopaths | $12,000 | $21,929 | 276 |
Kickstarter doesn't let you raise your goal after launching, so the "goal" column does accurately include initial project goals.
Looking at our projected costs and the amounts other bands have been able to raise we decided to set our goal at $3,000, which is ~85% of our likely costs.