There are several ways for an artist or a band to obtain the money it needs to get started: Savings, parents, friends, investors, loans, grants and sponsors. You will probably buy your instruments, and pay for any studio time, using your own money and money from family and even friends. But when you start thinking about marketing, you will probably get beyond your budget quickly. Radio promotion, PR, retail marketing, gig support, and even video promotion and TV advertising, will take far, far more money than what you spent on making your music.

Major labels typically spend ten times as much on marketing as they do on making the music. An album that took $100,000 (USD) to make will have at least a million dollars set aside for marketing (and a half million of that is for radio.) But that is how you reach the public. The foremost problem for most bands is finding the money in the first place; if they do find it, the problem then becomes how to pay it back. You've reached all those fans with your music, now how do you repay the money back to those people who gave it to you?

You don't. You instead find a sponsor. This site (TalentFunding.com) focuses on connecting you with people that will give you a sponsorship... money that is given to you which does not have to be paid back. In return, you display and/or announce the sponsor's name to your fans. Think Nascar. How much sponsorship money you get, and how much/long you promote the sponsor's name to your fans, is the big negotiating point that TalentFunding.com helps you with.

Music sponsors tend to be individual people, as opposed to companies. You probably won't have Joe's Tires wanting to sponsor you as much as you would have "Joe Smith" wanting to. Look at the credits of a movie... most will have an "executive producer" listed... someone who just puts up the money for making the movie. These executive producers, however, want their money back; sponsors do not. Insead, sponsors want their name to be displayed/promoted to your fans, kind of like the way advertising works.

You register, do a free search for sponsors, and then pay $5 (USD) to contact only the sponsors that looks promising to you. To make contact with a sponsor, you start with a "contact request".  He sees your request, looks at your profile, and decides to either accept or decline your contact request. If the sponsor accepts, you can then use the system email to send messages back and forth with him for no additional charge. If the sponsor declines, then you know that he feels you are not a good match.

Lastly, you can read the How-To section, which explains the details of band sponsorships.