01/25/2018
Feed The Muse has officially closed it's doors. We want to thank everyone that has helped us to champion this movement of crowd-funding. Feed The Muse was created by MilkBoy the Studio.
Faced with a struggling music industry, file sharing, home recording equipment becoming so affordable and most importantly, the recession MilkBoy the recording studio went into survival mode. In late 2008 we came up with the idea of trying to help artists find the money they'd need to produce their projects. We had seen a model of this concept being used with charitable fundraising sites like Race for the Cure. Someone had sent us a link to their team page where we were able to donate to the cause with our credit card, right from our desk and leave a little message. We thought why not create something for artists that worked just the same.
When we did a little more research we saw that the great Jill Sobule had already created her own website and raised a significant amount of money in place of a record label! Now we thought we were on to something. Back then, it was not a simple task to build your own website that had the ability to process credit cards. Musicians had no money to record and definitely had no money to create a website for this very unique idea. We knew that we had to build the site and give artists, musicians and bands the tools to raise money for themselves. However, we felt that an artists' "bull-sh*t detectors" was very sensitive so we wanted to create something that made the process simple and not too scammy. We tried to be artist friendly, with low fees and you didn't need a credit card to get started. With Feed The Muse you could immediately create a page and start raising money in 15 minutes without having to spend a penny.
In the spring of 2009 we had built our first prototype when someone said, "Have you heard of Kickstarter?" At that point Kickstarter was just in Beta and they were doing the same thing, but their fees were higher and you only got your money if you reached your goal which was not a part of our model. Feeling confident that we were the same, but different we immediately launched Feed The Muse in May 2009 as the artists' choice. Others launched like PledgeMusic and RocketHub with their own spin almost simultaneously. We all had the same idea at the same time. It's funny how the universe works like that. Let that be a lesson to us all, that if you have an idea, you better get on it because you can be as sure as anything that if you've thought it so has someone else and the race to market has already begun.
The team that built this and helped maintain it all these years was Jamie Lokoff, Tommy Joyner, Tom Laskas, Cody Cichowski, Patti Wilson Withstandley, Joanna Leigh Simon, Caitlin McCullough and many more. Crowdfundiing has come a looooong way since that first seed of an idea. The concept of "crowdfunding", which was hard to explain at first, is now a part of our common vernacular. Our goal wasn't to make money at this (and we didn't.. so good for us ) but to be there as a support to the artistic community at large and in that, Feed The Music was a great success. We may not have grown to our full potential, but MilkBoy was busy growing MilkBoy with MilkBoy, MilkBoy South Street, MilkBoy ArtHouse, Shake Audio Post at MilkBoy and our film Slow Learners.
I'll leave you with what I consider to be the best video ever created to help convey the idea of crowdfunding. This video was ahead of its time and made with the help of the late, great artist and friend Todd Marrone and music by the very talented The Fleeting Ends. Thank you all for letting us be a part of your vision! Goodnight and Farewell.
