Crowd funding website allows record labels to gauge the demand for re-issues.
A new website, Beat Delete, offers record labels the opportunity to crowd fund re-pressings of out-of-print releases. Soft launched this week, the project allows users to pre-order a proposed release, committing themselves to buying a copy at a set price if the overall level of demand is sufficient to justify a re-press.
Once a project passes its threshold (as low as 50 or 75 copies in some cases), payment is taken, the CD or vinyl gets pressed and everyone who pre-ordered receives a copy. If a release fails to reach its threshold, pre-orders are cancelled and no payment is taken.
The concept is very similar to the hugely successful crowd funding sites Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which allow users to coordinate funding campaigns for new products, artistic projects and creative endeavours. By asking users to ‘pledge’ cash, project organisers can simultaneously assess the level of demand for their project and raise capital.
The smartphone-linked Pebble e-paper watch is the most successful Kickstarter project to date, with over $10m pledged by a total of 68,928 people. The Pebble entered production and began shipping in January. A precedent for crowd-funded musical projects already exists; ‘direct-to-fan’ websites such as ArtistShare, PledgeMusic and SellABand allow fans to fund artists’ recording projects directly.
Beat Delete is spearheaded by UK independent stalwart Ninja Tune. At present, most of the records on offer come from relatively well-known independent labels under the Ninja Tune umbrella. There’s a notable lack of dance music (largely due to the labels involved) but it’ll be interesting to see if other labels join the project and expand the variety of releases on offer.
Likewise, it’ll be interesting to see whether Beat Deleted has an impact on the second-hand market – some of the albums on offer are widely available on sites like Discogs, and second-hand prices could be driven down significantly if they’re re-pressed.
Whether Beat Delete will make much of an impact on the world of dance music is debatable. Dance vinyl often gets left out of print not because the record label fears insufficient demand for a re-press, but because it adds to the mystique of the artist, keeps the focus on new music and fuels hype via the re-selling market. It seems unlikely, for example, that any amount of crowd funding could have encouraged FCL to re-press ‘It’s You’.
At the time of writing, MF Doom’s Take Me To Your Leader looks likely to be the first project to be re-pressed, requiring just ten more orders to reach its funding target.