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Self-Funding Your Career

Sarah Dando Slicethepie/PR & Marketing Manager

AP: Describe how your program works:
SD: Slicethepie is a place where artists can raise money direct from their fans to professionally record and release an album.

We do this by turning every music fan into a record label. The existing industry model is based on a few record labels providing a lot of money to 100's of artists. Slicethepie enables a model where millions of music fans each provide a little money to 1,000's of artists.

Here’s how it works: “Arenas” at slicethepie.com are where artists secure financing. There are 3 stages to each Arena:

#1: Scout Room, where music fans randomly and anonymously review each submitted track at least 10 times;

#2: Showcase, where up to 20 best-reviewed artists from the Scout Room seek to secure a minimum of 3,000 offers of £5 (about $10 USD) each to enable them to move to the Financing stage;

#3: Get Financed, where all artists from the Showcase with enough support secure a minimum of £15,000 (about $30,000 USD) to record and release an album;

A genre specific Arena is opened whenever we receive enough demand from artists in that genre, each Arena holds up to a maximum of 1,000 artists.

AP: How does Slicethepie differ from other Artist Funding sources – what makes it unique?
SD: Music fans get paid to review and discover new music so they’re motivated to become active supporters.

Fans/investors become emotionally and financially involved at all levels of the music industry - scouting, breaking, investing in and influencing real artists. Fans, artists and pure speculators can gamble on, trade in and profit from the success of new albums that they back. For the first time, fans and investors can be involved in all aspects of the music industry and share in the financial success of single tracks and album sales.

This helps Artists build significantly larger fanbases and receive greater exposure and:

Artists keep 100% of their publishing and copyrights; receive royalties up to nine time greater than in a traditional record deal and are free to sign a record deal at any time.

AP: What is the average amount artists can raise?
SD: Artists that get through to the financing stage have to raise a minimum of £15,000 ($30,000).

AP: What are the risks involved?
SD: There is no catch; Slicethepie is simply a far more efficient model where all the benefits flow directly to the artists and the fans.

Record labels lose money on 90% of artists they sign to a traditional record deal. This means 90% of money poured into the industry is wasted. How many other businesses lose money on 90% of the products they sell? It's a broken model.

With Slicethepie 100% of albums are pre-financed by fan so there is no waste.