While the lucky few who are able to attend TEDGlobal 2010 reside in Oxford, TED fans in The Netherlands are invited by a team of excited organizers from Amsterdam to meet each other for a live streaming of the event at comedy institution Boom Chicago. This wonderful club gives TED enthusiasts the possibility to ‘get inspired, spark conversation and make connections’ while enjoying a four-day program with local speakers, acts and music put together especially for them.
On stage: Pim Betist
Joining TEDxAmsterdam Live on Wednesday afternoon is Pim Betist, Dutch entrepreneur and the founder of Sellaband and Africa Unsigned, initiatives that allow fans to invest in the projects of their favourite musicians.
With beautiful music playing in the background, Betist shortly introduces himself by sharing with the audience the turn of events that led him to starting his own business a few years ago. As a sales manager working for Shell, he was sent to a leadership-development workshop at the end of which participants were asked to share with one another what they had learnt. Betist revealed he had learnt a few things: He didn’t like this job, he was therefore going to leave Shell and start his own record lable.
Two weeks later he had traded his canal house and lease car for an anti-squat home and a scooter, but felt happier than ever and at the beginning of his career in trying to change the music industry. The foundation of Sellaband became a huge hit and 36 acts raised over 50.000 dollars in support of their music and albums. However, as he points out, raising funds turned out to have had more to do with good marketing than making the best music and musicians were still not picked up by radio and television. Betist began to feel unhappy again and left Sellaband, after which he started working with his current passion: The discovery and promotion of The New African Sound.
Africa Unsigned offers a trampoline for unknown African musicians and a means for music lovers to offer support to their favourite artists. How? By investing money, which in turn gives them the ability to listen to the music and earn half of the profits after an album releases. Betist truly believes this approach of giving power to the consumer is *the* way to go with projects in all kinds of areas. Sellaband proved nearly 3 million dollars could be raised for unknown artists. Besides, Africa has great potential but is wrongly ignored in today’s music industry.
Crowd funding could be the future of music and have a tremendous impact on society. Africa is an ‘open lake waiting to be discovered’.
Information about this speaker
Pim Betist, founder of Africa Unsigned, also created online label SellaBand, attracting music fans to invest and empower unsigned artists. More than 3 million dollars were invested in unsigned talent and around 50 artists “crowdfunded” $50,000 to record and release their album. Pim was nominated Dutch Direct Marketing Man of the year in 2008 and won the title of best speaker at MIE, Holland’s largest marketing conference in 2008. In January 2010 he was listed in Management Team as one of Holland’s top 25 creative business people.
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