Music Funding 101

Why No Money for Recording?

TalentFunding.com focuses exclusively on helping bands find money for marketing. Why? How come we do not include instrument costs, recording costs, and CD manufacturing costs in the proposed sponsorship amounts? Wouldn't these items appear to be a fundamental part of "getting the music out there?" Yes they would, but they are so fundamental, and so basic, that it's kind of like saying that having a mouth is fundamental for singing.

Instruments, recording, and CD manufacturing are so ground level to the way that bands think, that most bands will have already devised a plan to get these things done on their own. Besides, it's very cheap to record music (although you can waste as much money as you want to on it). Marketing, however, has no cheap options. It is very, very expensive. When looking at the large national picture, the most expensively-recorded album does not cost one tenth of what the marketing costs would be (if the album were marketed properly).

To be sponsored, a band has to be doing good live shows. This is requirement number one, and a CD is not required for this (although it is understood that having a CD certainly makes the process of getting shows easier.) Now, being able to give a potential sponsor a CD would make it much easier for him to take it home and play it to others. But without a live show, most bands will just not have the sales skills that are needed to close a sponsorship deal. Most potential sponsors just cannot be expected to only listen to a CD to decide if money should be put into the band.

Sponsors are (generally) not music business people. By definition, they are from other areas of business, and have a desire to promote themselves by being associated with music. So they usually can be motivated by showing them a lot of people having a good time at the band's shows. Sponsors are smart enough so see the connection between people watching the band, and people being exposed to the sponsor's name. And sponsors are willing to pay for such a connection because of the fans involved. However, it's too far of a stretch to assume that sponsors will want to pay for a band to just sit and record, isolated, in a studio. It just doesn't involve the fans that sponsors want to reach.

Another thing: some filtering must be set up to only let the serious bands through to the sponsors. Already having a CD is a pretty good filter. It's my estimate that there are thousands of bands that manufacture their album on CD every week (going through a glass-mastered CD manufacturing company), and this does not include every other band that burns and labels their own CD's from their computers. This quantity of finished CD's is quite enough for sponsors to choose from. Sponsors should not need to consider every additional person that says "I'd like to record an album, if I could just get the money to do it."

The actual funding target, marketing, is by far the most difficult part of the music business (I would say it actually is the majority of the music business), and the major and major-indie record labels spend ninety percent of their budgets on it. This is good thing, however, because potential sponsors are versed in marketing much more so than they are with recording music. By talking to sponsors about marketing, the band will be speaking the right language to them. While bands (and their friends and fans) like to think that it's the music that matters, the sponsorship will move farther faster by thinking that it's the marketing that matters.

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