The Wisdom of Crowdfunding and a Life Changing Few Quid

As a great many of you will be aware I recently took my first step into the world of crowdfunding. At the time of writing the campaign has been running for a little over a week and a half. The response has been amazing and I am sincerely appreciative of everyone who has either contributed or helped to spread the word. Even just sharing a link to my page is a massive help.

Like everyone else I had watched the growth of crowdfunding sites and have contributed to several projects, usually jazz musicians recording exciting and innovative new music which otherwise might not get a hearing.  I recently made a small contribution to a great young jazz artist who has composed and recorded some exceptional music, and it was this project in particular that prompted me to give it a go for myself.

Like most musicians I do not have vast reserves of cash washing around which I can spend to indulge my creative whims, and this is very often the key hurdle to developing new work. Indeed, a fellow drummer who is one of the most revered players on the scene (himself a successful crowdfunder) told me a couple of years ago that he "couldn't afford to retire". In spite of what you might think we're not all mansion dwelling millionaires. Most players are working all the hours God sends in order to sustain themselves and support their families.

So, what to do? For a long tme I have fielded many requests about potential projects; from recording new big band music, recording old big band music, putting on concerts, producing a multi media training pack for big band drummers and so  on. Perhaps as a result of my growing profile as an educator in the last little while there has been considerable interest in the prospect of doing an instructional DVD. As you will probably be aware the last option was the one I chose to pursue, and you may well be wondering why.

The answer is simply that  I have spent several decades developing and refining a whole range of techniques and concepts for drummers, and although nothing is ever completely unique in our world my ideas are quite unlike anything else I have seen out there, and having seen the benefit to so many students over the years I thought it was probably high time I distilled the best of it into something that might be of use to present and future generations of drummers. Just like everyone else I can't be in more than one place at any given time so it seemed like a logical next step. Also given the huge interst in drumming I have witnessed in China it is my intention to have a Mandarin soundtrack option too. Does anyone know a bilingual drummer with a good speaking voice??

It's not the first time that I have funded a project via an external source. In the dying days of the pre Blair Tory government some bright spark thought it might be a good idea to get rid of some of the enormous cash surplus that was washing around (remember the 'war chest' anyone?) by allowing indviduals and community organisations to apply for small amounts of funding up to ( as I reacll) a maximum of £5000.

The initiative was called Arts for All and it changed my life completely.

A four thousand pound grant enabled me to take the big band into the studio and make our first album. The timing was perfect as the band had been playing regularly for about two and a half years, was sounding great and had established a repertoire of its own. Without that funding the first album simply would not have happened. At the time it was pivotal as the CD release was the key to stepping up a gear from the Sunday lunchtime London jazz gig circuit to better venues, festivals and radio airplay. Perhaps more significantly the whole emphasis of my professional life began slowly to shift, and something that we did for fun on a Tuesday morning or a Sunday afternoon began to become the Magnetic North of my career, and the path to all kinds of opportunities I couldn't have forseen when we decided to 'get together for a blow' on a wintry Tuesday in early 1995.

Apart from a small touring grant a couple of years later I never sought any further arts funding. My belief is that if a small injection of public finance is enough to get a new project off the ground and if it can subsequently go on to be self-sustaining then that is a close to perfect scenario.

That's the way it was back then before the internet took over the world. Even twenty years ago though things had come a long way from the days when your fate as a performing artist was in the hands of a rich, fat man with a big cigar. Small independent record labels and self-starting musicians had gradually liberated jazz from the increasingly commercially driven agenda of what we used to call major record labels. The closed shop of old had become an open market but was as nothing compared to the opportunities and freedom available to creative people in 2017. Back in the 90s without the support of Jazzizit records and the Arts Council I could not have got off the starting blocks, but now I can and so can you.

Having spent several months working on my proposal prior to launching, this whole process has been thought provoking to say the least, and it led me to reflect not for the first time upon the power of the internet and specifically its impact upon me personally.

For me the first game changer was Youtube. Having released the first two albums and played a huge number of shows the band had become a fixture on the UK jazz scene but the reach was decidedly limited. When it was still in its infancy over a decade ago I digitised some old VHS tapes of live performances and put them out there to see what might happen. Over a period of time, by no means over night, I began to connect with more and more people around the globe, especially in the USA and much more recently a series of drum instructional  videos produced to promote the band's 20th anniversary concert has had tens of thousands of views and left me inundated with requests for individual lessons and drum show appearances from Stafford to Shanghai.

So the internet gave me the opportunity to reach a wider audience, but it was social media that enabled me to retain that audience. Now, through the contemporary phenomenon of crowdfunding anyone with an idea they would like to bring to fruition can involve the end user from the earliest stage of the production process, and this is exactly what I have done. From a producer or executive producer credit to having some influence on the content of the finished production this endeavour is to some extent a collective effort.

 In the simplest terms, for someone like me crowdfunding creates the opportunity to offer an audience the facility to buy into a proposed future production, and in the event that insufficient people do then it's up to me to have a rethink and come up with something that the audience actually wants.

This strikes me as a very positive development and gives me good reason to be optimistic about the future of our creative and cultural well-being. Also it helps a little bit to level the age old playing field where familiy wealth and or connections all too often trump talent and merit.

My thanks to everyone who has helped with this both by pledging support and helping to spread the word. truly I couldn't do it without you, but wihout you there wouldn't be a whole lot of point.

The crowdfunding page can be found here.

We Do Play Requests......

As many of you know I took my first steps in the world of crowdfunding earlier this week and the response so far has been little short of remarkable.

The content of the dvd is something I have been working on for many years and the trick now is to distill ideas, concepts and techniques into a finished product that will be as beneficial as possible to drummers of every stripe. Invariably in clinics and personal tuition I find myself stating that very little of what we do is actually 'genre specific' and that there are a relatively small  number of key criteria in playing from which everything else stems.

So, drummers, in order to best reflect the truly democratic nature of crowdfunding I am only too happy to consider suggestions (legal and decent please 😆) with regard to topics for inclusion.

We do play requests, so feel free.

Crowdfunding campaign is here......https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pete-cater-drum-instruction-dvd-music-jazz/x/15946557#/