Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Public Enemy Wants You To Fund Their New Album

Posted by Jon Blistein on Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 4:56 PM

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More big news in the hip-hop world today (Free Method Man!!): Public Enemy is recording their thirteenth album. Or, they want to, anyway, and they'd like you to pay for—er, I mean fund, it! Teaming up with the website SellaBand.com, Chuck D, Flava Flav, Terminator X, and the Bomb Squad are asking fans to help them raise $250,000 for what I assume covers all recording costs, expenses, and solid gold clock-necklaces. With a donation of $25 you get both an exclusive version of the new album plus a portion of the albums actual profits. It’s kind of like that micro-loan site Kiva, but instead of giving your money to impoverished workers in third-world countries, it goes to this guy so he can make an album that probably won’t be nearly as good as this one.

Still, the idea of SellaBand.com is pretty neat—it’s like the “pay-what-you-want” method, but you get that warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that your money is actually helping in the recording process. And this model perfect sense for a group like Public Enemy that has a pretty nasty history of getting fucked over by record labels. The real question, though, is whether or not the model will work for emerging artists. While SellaBand.com does offer you the chance to preview artists before donating (obviously), people are certainly going to be more willing to donate (and donate more) to established acts like PE than some kid from Ohio with a guitar and a pirated copy of Pro Tools. But if this actually works, then you certainly won’t hear me complaining: Any successful alternative to record labels is fine by me. That said, I should probably get out my debit card and make a donation; but I’m kind of strapped for cash right now and $25 can go a pretty long way at Trader Joe’s. Although if I can get a guarantee on a second collaboration with Anthrax, I might be a bit more inclined to shell out some cash.

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