Fans of Freezepop have chipped in where online streaming could not — and it’ll pave the way for the production of the Boston synth-pop group’s fifth studio album.
Yesterday, the veteran electronic quartet launched a Kickstarter in which they asked fans to chip in and pay for the new record. In the crowd-funding campaign’s video, the band playfully showed off a royalty check received from online streams of Freezepop music — and it was for a whopping $2.93.
Freezepop didn’t disclose the amount of streams or the time frame which the check represented, but the message was clear. “Internet music streaming is amazing”, says keyboardist Christmas Disco Marie Sagan with a full serving of tasty sardonic sauce. “It’s this totally new business model that in no way screws over musicians and songwriters.”
Freezepop turned to their fans, and their fans delivered. Nearly 24 hours after the Kickstarter was launched, the band hit their goal of $30,000. Nearly 600 backers have chipped in, and the project, directed by Michael Gill, has now entered a period of “stretch goals”, like producing the new album on vinyl, issuing “bonus” releases of additional music, and potential collaborations.
“It’s been a crazy 48 hours at Camp Freezepop and we’re in near-disbelief at the outpouring of love and affection for a 17-year-old synth-pop band that never really played the game very well,” singer and synth-man Sean Drinkwater tells Vanyaland. “We’ve been lucky to have been afforded some great opportunities over the years, and all we can really promise is that we’ll keep raising the bar on ourselves and keep making records that we think are even better than the ones which came before. We will never put out something we aren’t happy with just to have something out.”
It’s been five years since Freezepop’s last release, Imaginary Friends, which found the band losing a founding member but adding two new players. It was a bit of a rebirth for the group that’s developed a global fan base through constant touring and song inclusion in video games like Frequency Amplitude, Phase, and the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series. But Drinkwater wasn’t sure how the layoff would affect the band’s crowd-funding efforts.
“Having been so, so long by today’s standards, we weren’t really sure what to expect,” he adds. “I think we all wondered at some point during the prep for this campaign if maybe $30,000 was asking a bit too much of a scattered fanbase who hadn’t heard from us in quite some time. Well, we’ve been absolutely overwhelmed at the outpouring and all the lovely and kind messages in the last two days. We’ve already written three more songs! There’s simply no way to accurately let all our super-fans and supporters over the years know just how much they’ve meant to us as fans and individuals, so we’ll have to let the music on album number five do the talking.”
Watch Freezepop’s Kickstarter campaign video below, click the link for more information on how to contribute, and mark your calendar for May 14, when the ‘Pop play the Sinclair in Cambridge with Casey Desmond’s new project CMB, the Static Dynamic, and symbion project.