Band Together

For $250, The Fly will make you a personalized video. For $500, they'll write you a song. And for $1,000, Keith Smith and Ferasha Baylock, both juniors at Syracuse University, will bring their theatrical, high-octane hip-hop to your living room — top hats, spandex, face paint, and all.

Before Kickstarter, The Fly couldn't afford to play your living room, let alone New York City's Sidewalk Café or the other two dozen venues they toured last summer. But with the help of Kickstarter, a crowd-sourced fundraising site for artists, musicians and entrepreneurs, the cash-strapped college students bought a keyboard, pressed their first EP, and set out on a three-month summer tour. They

weren't the first campus artists to profit from the site: In January 2010, student-run label O, Morning Records raised more than $5,000 to buy studio time for its five artists. Three months later, "potato rapper" ToTs — better known as Michael Heagerty, the coordinator of SU's Mobile Literacy Arts Bus — released his third album through Kickstarter.

"College-aged artists dominate the crowd-sourcing trend," says David Rezak, the head of SU's Bandier, or music industry, program. "It's a great concept: you put money in, you invest in an artist, and you have that sense of pride and propriety — you're a patron of their work."

For college artists, Kickstarter's simplicity drives its appeal. Artists make

profiles asking for money, fans donate money to projects they care about, and artists reward them with CDs, T-shirts, and home-cooked meals. A lo-fi promotional video and a blitz of Facebook and Myspace requests earned The Fly $3,358 from 67 fans — 25 percent more than their original goal. Rezak, several SU classmates, and listeners from around the globe chipped in.

"Man, it was just crazy," Smith says. "I still can't believe it. So many of the people who donated were people I just knew in passing or who stumbled across our Myspace. They set us up in a really good way."

But the forces driving The Fly's campaign go far beyond a loyal fan base and some Internet savvy, Rezak says.

Kickstarter's launch in April 2009 coincided with tidal changes in the recording industry: plummeting album sales, hemorrhaging profits, and a sudden unwillingness to invest in youngartists. Record labels, both independent and major, stopped signing the type of development deals that campus acts once sought.

"Crowd-sourcing is driven by necessity," he says. "There's such a large number of high-quality college artists, and so few of them are getting signed."

That disparity only boosted Kickstarter. Now in its second year, the site celebrated a major milestone — $40 million in pledges — in early March. More than 600,000 people have registered with the site as artists or donors, and while Kickstarter doesn't

track their ages, Rezak suspects that many fall in the 18-to-25 range. This particular subset of starving artists has nowhere else to look.

"We're just broke college students," Baylock says with a shrug in The Fly's Kickstarter video.

"We need your help to start this," Smith echoes. "This is our dream."