Mircofundo

About me:

FOR FANS

MICROFUNDO is changing the way the world finances music by applying the principles of microfinancing to the music industry – a Kiva.org for music.

MICROFUNDO’s mission is to support the entrepreneurial activities of independent musicians from developing countries around the world – championing undiscovered musicians who would otherwise not have the means to develop their music careers.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Choose a Musician's Campaign, Lend, Get Repaid

1. Music Fans like you can browse Campaigns of Musicians and choose an artist to lend to. When you lend, using Paypal or your credit card, Microfundo collects the funds and then passes them along to the artist once they've reached their goal.

2. Over time the artist is able to repay the loan via sales of digital downloads of their music that is distributed through Microfundo's media partners at Natonal Geographic and Mondomix.

3. When you get your money back you can re-lend to another artist Campaign or choose to purchase their artists' new releases or you can simply keep your money.

You, the fan, provide microfunding for musicians from one of the unlikely music capitals of the world - the townships of Capetown, South Africa, say, or the favelas in Salvador, Brazil. You are directly engaged in their creative process - making new and completely unique recordings that wouldn't exist without your assistance.

Change the lives of our Artists and help develop a thriving music economy around the globe.

FANS: Join us - it's easy! >>

OTHER WAYS TO GET INVOLVED

Become a Microfundo fan on Facebook

Follow Microfundo on Twitter

Subscribe to Microfundo videos on Youtube

FOR MUSICIANS:

MICROFUNDO will help you fund your music career. Need capital for your next recording? Looking for financial support for your next tour? We can help you raise funding directly from your fans and develop a core fan base from across the globe.

HOW TO START YOUR MICROFUNDO CAMPAIGN

• CREATE YOUR ARTIST PROFILE - example: http://microfundo.mymondomix.com/sofiamusic
  
• CREATE YOUR MICROFUNDO CAMPAIGN: Define a music project that has a budget of no more than $1,000. Your project’s funding can be for studio time, pressing a CD, tour support for travel to a festival, production costs on a new music video or any other music business expense - example: http://microfundo.mymondomix.com/otrabanda/musicvideo
  

MUSICIANS: Get Started Now >>

HOW DOES THE MONEY WORK?

1. Fans make loans to your Campaign in micro-amounts of $25 each.

2. Once your Campaign goal is reached, you receive the full amount of your microfunding Campaign.

3. Microfundo will distribute your music in the Mondomix.MP3 music store and offer your music for sale as downloads as a way to repay your Campaign amount to fans.

4. Microfundo will use the first 130% of your Campaign amount, earned from your music download sales, to repay the full Campaign amount to fans, to cover Paypal transaction fees and to cover our costs.

PROMOTION

Once your campaign is live promote yourself and your project:

• INVITE YOUR FANS: Message your current fan base and invite them to your project page URL
• SUPPORT OTHER PROJECTS: ..Browse other projects by artists you know or that are similar to your and click on the 'Support' button. You will appear on these pages and you can attract other fans to your project
• USE MICROFUNDO'S FACEBOOK PAGE: Any artist with a project can post onto the wall of Microfundo's Facebook page. Post news about your upcoming shows, thank-you's to fans and share your creative process. The Microfundo page acts as an artist collective and gives you the chance to share your work and inspiration with the entire Microfundo community on Facebook.
• USE MICROFUNDO'S TWITTER PAGE: Any artist with a project can post to Microfundo's Twitter account as yourself. We know that mainatining a twitter account on your own is a lot of work every day! By posting to Microfundo's Twitter page you can be active with a large group of followers while only posting your most important activities and thoughts a few times each week.

LARGER CAMPAIGNS Once you have successfully completed a Debut Campaign we can help you design and execute larger microfunding campaigns.

PHILOSOPHY

What's the solution for how to survive as a struggling musician? Given the current hype and the herd mentality, during the next year 5,000,000 artists will be using Twitter and fan relationship management tools to attempt to acquire fans. Imagine five million artists pounding out emails, tweets and fan management action items... Three years from now, most artists will be disappointed.

1,000 TRUE FANS

According to Wired Magazine editor Kevin Kelly, rather than looking to become the next major-label star, an artist need only find 1,000 true fans -- defined as those who will buy everything produced by the artist. If each True Fan is willing to give up a day's wage ($100) each year to support the artist, then a single artist with 1,000 True Fans can earn $100,000 per year.

Helping you build your relationships with your True Fans is the real goal of our work at Microfundo. Your Debut Campaign is an essential first step in funding your music startup costs and engaging your own True Fans.

BUT, getting your 1,000 True Fans is hard. Music fans are frequenting a hundred different disparate sites and they are engaging with music in a myriad of ways. An artist is extremely fortunate if he or she can attract a large audience within one or more of these online fragments at a time.

Bruce Warila, at Music Think Tank, suggests visualizing the fragmentation of the music consumption marketplace this way: “Genres are coastlines, niches within genres are beachfront properties, and standalone artists are rocks or grains of sand. Sticking with the metaphor: coastlines and beachfront properties are compelling, interesting and entertaining; rocks and sand are things that get stuck in your shorts and sandals.”

“Moving forward, trusted entertainment channel providers - filters that can continuously find great songs for a niche - will have access to music fans as surely as consumers desire to gain access to the beach; alternatively, attempts by standalone artists to ‘manage’ relationships with fans will be as welcome as sand in a sandwich.”

Your work as an artist promoting yourself single-handedly on a social network site like Facebook is like producing a fine handcrafted work of art. It’s very labor intensive and has inherent inefficiencies. Every industry has gone through the process of evolving from handmade cottage industry production until someone like Henry Ford came along and made it possible to produce more efficiently for greater numbers of people. Microfundo wants to create the same kind of efficiencies for your extremely labor intensive work of online self-promotion.

BAND TOGETHER

Winning the hearts and minds of music fans will come most efficiently when similar artists band together to form compelling entertainment ‘channels’ benefiting from the attention garnered by the entire group. What's true for one Brazilian artist's fans is that they will likely fall in love with the music of several other Brazilian bands. By using the social network platform at Microfundo and collectively posting to Microfundo’s Facebook, Twitter and Youtube accounts, similar artists can band together as a collective niche and provide a compelling entertainment channel for their fans.

MUSICIANS: Get Started Now >>



AVANTRIO: http://microfundo.mymondomix.com/sofiamusic/avantrio



TEKEYE: http://microfundo.mymondomix.com/tekeye/tour



LA OTRABANDA: http://microfundo.mymondomix.com/otrabanda/musicvideo