Kingfisher Album Kickstarter
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
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.