Maybe that’s web 3.0

Those were the words of my friend Jochen Doppelhammer when he showed me the website SellaBand. And in fact I find the idea just amazing.

The concept is simple, connecting creators, in this case musicians, and believers, in this case investors. You enter the website, check some interesting stuff (out of 5 bands I’ve listened to, I liked 2, not necessarily a good statistic but gets you going anyway), and if you like it, you make a contribution for the artists. However, this contribution is not a simple “yes my boy, keep the good work” action, but actually it grants you a share of the artist’s stocks. The top goal for each artist is to reach US$ 50.000, so each US$ 10 (the minimum) contribution gets you 0.02% of the contract. I checked the charts for contribution and some artists have already reached US$ 14.000, with a single believer putting US$ 810 out of his own pocket.

So, it’s about user generated content but what it’s even greater it’s about user generated investment capital. As Jochen put it “it’s P2P VC”.

Of course the final goal makes you wonder: do you really need that much money to record a CD, especially now with pro-am equipments and all the DIY music culture? Well, I guess the money itself it’s just a part of the buzz. Each contribution gets an exclusive CD, so that’s already 5.000 copies the artist needs to send out (plus shipping), which I would imagine is not that cheap. But anyway, you get to take part of a collaborative investment; you get a CD for your money and may even make some money in the long run, so.