Taking The Pledge

At a time when the music industry is in a state of flux, 23-year-old Galway-born, Dublin-based experimental musician Laura Sheeran has turned her mind to the tricky business of surviving – and hopefully thriving – as an artist.

Sheeran is one of the first musicians in the Republic to use the recent concept of an online ‘pledge campaign’ to finance an album. While the approach was pioneered successfully here by songwriter and film maker Nick Kelly, the difference in Sheeran’s approach is that there is a charity twist to it.
Sheeran’s campaign is handled by Pledge Music, who provide promotion for the artist on their site, administer the pledging process and collection of funds and pass on a cut to the relevant charity.
“By mobilising the support of fans and friends,” explains Sheeran, “pledge campaigns provide an alternative strategy for musicians to raise advance capital for recording projects. The pledgers then become part of the project, in collaboration with the artist. The bottom line is getting pre-orders for CDs, but there’s also other exclusive incentives and options – like signed copies, original artworks, gigs at one’s home, lyric sheets and so on.”
On Pledge Music, the campaigns have a fixed time-frame of 60 days. If the target amount is not reached within that period, all pledges become void and the artist receives nothing (and neither do Pledge Music). And if it goes ahead?
“Pledgers also get added value during the campaign in the form of exclusive tracks, video footage and images, which they get sent, along with regular updates from the artist about how the project is going,” Laura adds. “The relationship between artist and fans becomes much closer and more personal, allowing fans and the artist to interact during the creative phase of the album. Another really positive thing is that a certain percentage of the funds goes to a charity chosen by the artist. The charity I’ve chosen is Depaul Ireland.”
If Sheeran’s campaign succeeds, we can look forward this autumn to the multi-instrumentalist’s debut LP – a lusciously ethereal, haunting, 14-track double album called Lust of Pig and The Fresh Blood.
In the wider scheme of things, Sheeran believes that, in the climate created by free downloading, it’s time for musicians to think outside the box.
“The problem isn’t necessarily that free downloading happens, but that we haven’t yet worked out a way to incorporate it,” she says. “I embraced the concept of releasing music for free last April with my EP, Music for the Deep Woods. The response was wonderful. Within the first six weeks it had received over 1,500 downloads. The music was heard far beyond the Dublin music scene. I understood then the benefits of free downloading – it potentially opens up whole new worlds that may have been dormant forever, had the music not been freely accessible online.
“In terms of publicity, that is fantastic. There’s absolutely no way I could afford to create a whole double album for free. With the pledge idea, it won’t matter if my album ends up freely downloadable online, because it will already have paid its way up front.
“Getting Lust of Pig and The Fresh Blood out will hopefully get me off the dole and out of the poverty trap,” Sheeran concludes. “But for this to happen, the album has to be actually produced. That’s where the online investment community created by a pledge campaign comes in. The concept reflects the budding DIY culture being generated in the arts as a result of the recession and other factors.”