The Variety article nails it. Note that Stephane Courbit (ex-Endemol) invested in it and Warner has partnered with them.

Yes, I don’t like much their website. (French websites are not very usable.)

I can’t say more other than the superficial knowledge I have of them. I am not much into the music business, and I don’t read the French press much. And I am only into Jazz and Jarre music these days.

But I liked Gregoire’s song. Best wishes to him.

I like the general concept. I would like to be more informed about the same kind of websites in other industries. I am sure it should be replicated in other industry.

Best wishes to Max and Stacy.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyMajorCompany looks orders of magnitude more successful than others I’ve seen if the numbers on their site are real. Looks like a number of fairly significant investors/donors http://www.mymajorcompany.com/Producteurs?order=top_producers#search and 13 http://www.mymajorcompany.com/Artistes that have raised 70k euros. However, their search form seems to be broken for all artists except those 13.

Couple English references http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117998016.html?categoryid=1009&cs=1 and http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2009/04/12/lighters_down_checkbooks_up/

I guess I’ll have to revisit the category.

Max,

I’ve always been more interested in the sociopolitical utility to markets and PM’s than just their financial edge.

Good luck with your new venture!

There will be elements of particular interest to the MO crowd with the PMF project. For what that’s worth… but I’ve always been more interested in the sociopolitical edge to markets and PM’s than just their financial utility. I think the events of the past two years have demonstrated what happens when people start looking to the Mr. Market for answers too much. I’ve been warning against ‘market fundamentalim’ (and this includes PM’s) on my various TV and radio shows for 6 years now… Hello, Iceland? Ireland? UK?

Max should answer the specific questions about his venture.

As for crowd-financed platforms for artists, in France, this one has managed to produce one young artist:
http://www.mymajorcompany.com/
The artist’s name is Gregoire:
http://www.mymajorcompany.com/gregoire
Sorry, I haven’t found articles about this in English.
The Gregoire has sold many CDs and went on many TV shows.

FWIW the idea that films and music can be crowd financed is old. A number of individual artists have done fairly well with the concept, but none of startups designed to provide a platform for artists (or in some cases software developers) to use to crowd finance stuff have done well. I wrote about some of them in http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/category/public-goods especially the earlier posts in that category (which is broader, so not all posts relevant), but got bored with the lack of sophistication and certain failure of each new platform I saw. Hopefully Keiser succeeds, through some combination of the time finally being right, some new twist, and of course vastly superior execution.