“I've had all kinds of trials and tribulations with business managers and people stealing from me constantly,” said Filter frontman Richard Patrick, who was in the midst of his second PledgeMusic campaign, following a successful fundraiser in 2016. “And now finally, I find this great little site that puts me in touch directly with people who want to hang out online, and lo and behold, someone’s gonna fuck that up too.”

Initially reluctant to try it, Patrick was soon won over by the fun of interacting with his fans (“You knew these fans really cared, so it made for this incredible bond with them,” he said). When PledgeMusic announced its closure last month, the industrial rock band had nearly 1,200 outstanding pledges for their new album, which reunites Patrick with original Filter member Brian Liesegang. Patrick says he is owed “tens of thousands” of dollars, but he intends to move forward with the release. “If it's the last thing I ever do, I’m going to make sure that I fulfill everything that was requested of me by the fans,” he added.

Dan Stuart, the founder of Tucson’s pioneering pre-Americana group Green on Red, launched a PledgeMusic campaign at the urging of his label, Cadiz Music, to help sell a solo album and a novel. While Cadiz paid for the manufacturing costs and fulfilled all the orders, Stuart had an agreement in place with the recording studio and the graphic designers who worked on his projects: they’d get paid when he got his cut of the PledgeMusic sales. Now he’s got to figure out how to pay them out of pocket.

Stuart compares PledgeMusic with Jem Records, the distributor whose 1988 bankruptcy was disastrous for independent labels and artists. “Jem used to pay just the big clients, so if something was really selling they would pay the bill because they’d want more to keep selling. If it wasn’t such a big client they’d ignore you or not pay you.”

Cadiz Music owner Richard England had used PledgeMusic for years; it was a good retail option because it could reach a large audience. Aside from Stuart’s album, England is owed money on campaigns for documentaries about the Slits and Madness singer Suggs, for a total of around £30,000 ($37,955). “At the beginning of last year, I would have forecast turning over maybe £100,000 ($126,517) worth of business with them,” England said. “I was certainly not expecting them to steal our money and go into administration [bankruptcy in the UK].”

For England, the PledgeMusic bankruptcy is just the most recent time a larger company collected money from the sale of products he paid to make, spent that money, then went out of business, effectively leaving him with the bill. The bankruptcy of Cadiz’s main distributor, Pinnacle Entertainment, in 2008 was a similarly unexpected and catastrophic experience, England says, as was last year’s collapse of music retailer HMV. England has taken out a £40,000 ($50,607) personal loan in order to meet his obligations. “I thought we’d be more insulated or protected against these things in this day and age, but we don’t seem to be,” he said. “It just seems to be the same, really.”

Ken Andrews says that without the money Failure is owed by PledgeMusic, the band can’t fulfill the orders for their fifth album, due to the hefty shipping costs of heavy vinyl packages. (The group also has no way of knowing which buyers were able to get refunds from their credit card companies or PayPal.) Andrews is somewhat consoled by the fact that everyone who pre-ordered the record at least got a digital download. Failure also intends to give these fans a USB drive full of previously unreleased material and rarities. But the larger feeling of being cheated lingers on.

“You know when you’re signing a record deal that you’re making a deal with the devil, in a sense, but the tradeoff is that they know they have to build you up in order to sell records,” he said. But 95 percent of Failure’s traffic to PledgeMusic came directly from the band’s social media, he claims, making the platform more or less a payment processor. “Basically artists were cutting Pledge in on their income stream. So what were they thinking when they started spending artists’ money? Just from an ethical standpoint, what were they thinking?”