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Digital Top Stories
Sellaband bought by German entrepreneur
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 25 February 2010
Faltering fan-funding website Sellaband yesterday announced it had a buyer.
As previously reported, the fan investment service went offline last week, and was declared bankrupt on Monday by courts in the Netherlands. Amid speculation as to what would happen to the company, and the money that had been pledged by fans but which was yet to be paid to bands, the service’s co-founder and top man Johan Vosmeijer told reporters on Tuesday that it was almost certain the firm would be bought and normal services would resume shortly afterwards.
Yesterday it was confirmed a buyer had, indeed, been found, in the form of Munich-based entrepreneur Michael Bogatzki. In a posting on the Sellaband website, Vosmeijer confirmed the acquisition, announced he would now stand down as CEO of the company, and said he was confident the new owners would be good to both bands and investors signed up with the service. The Sellaband website is expected to go live again imminently.
Vosmeijer: “I have spoken at length with the people who have bought www.sellaband.com and am totally convinced that they are just as committed as we always were to build a solid future for Sellaband. What is extremely important to me is that the new company, called SellaBand GmbH and to be operated out of Munich in Germany, will respect our commitments towards ‘believers’ and also to those artists who are currently recording their Sellaband album, and/or are about to release their music”. He added that his co-founder Dagmar Heijmans would stay with the company.
In another posting, Bogatzki himself said: “We will continue to advance this fantastic platform while acting in the spirit of the Sellaband community and its founders. Starting from today we proceed with this unique concept and maximise the potential of Sellaband with the trust and faith of all artists and believers. I am proud to be part of this idea and I will take care about the community and spirit of sellaband.com with your help and confidence”.
In his piece, Vosmeijer also said he still thought the fan-funding model would play an important role in the future of the music industry, and that Sellaband, despite its current problems, would be a big part of that. Though the service’s third co-founder, Pim Betist, who left the company eighteen months ago, was less optimistic in an interview with Wired magazine. He says that while he also thinks fan-funding has a future, that Sellaband needs to change the way it works to become a viable business.
Among the problems with the current Sellaband system, identified by Wired in its interview with Betist, is the service’s focus on having its artists release a full album CD, something which makes any Sellaband venture expensive, and something which is no longer necessary to launch a new artist. Betist also reckons that fan-funding services should specialise in certain sorts of music and should be more willing to turn mediocre acts away, and he admits that Sellaband put too much emphasis on getting the best producers to produce their artists’ albums rather than working out how the albums might be marketed and sold once they were produced.
