I could almost see the confusion written all over your face when you saw PledgeMusic on this list. How can a company that ‘cheated’ a lot of musicians and fans out of millions of dollars be on a list of heroes of the music industry?

According to a report by Citigroup in 2018, the majority (88%) of the revenue generated by the music industry goes to record labels, streaming platforms, and publishing companies, leaving the actual music creators with only 12%. For that reason, music creators have always been looking for ways to escape the middlemen-infested infrastructure of the music industry. When social media arrived in the early 2000s, it gave artists a way to access and build relationships directly with their fans, circumventing the middlemen-controlled radio and conventional media of the time. However, music creators still had to rely on record labels and other middlemen companies to facilitate the commerce of music. In 2009, what seemed to be a solution arrived in the form of PledgeMusic. According to Benji Rogers, founder “the way PledgeMusic puts out music is what the future of the release of an album looks like.” The new platform seemed to give music creators an infrastructure to source production costs directly from fans and control the sales/revenue of their music, enabling them to avoid paying the exorbitant costs of advance loans from record labels and keep most of the profits for themselves. The idea was promising enough that it received investments from several firms. With the lure to offer their fans a more personal experience, even famous artists started running campaigns on the platform. Around 2013, campaigns on PledgeMusic were exceeding their internal goals 86% of the time and the average amount raised was 30% over target. It was exciting for both fans and music creators!

Although a faulty revenue model and inability to scale led to an implosion that eventually took the company under in 2019, we cannot dismiss the fact that Rogers’ platform demonstrated that music creators and fans can do business directly without the need for record labels. Despite its unfairly fateful demise, PledgeMusic had a noble goal and proved that it is possible for music creators to rid themselves of the parasitic record labels to enable themselves to keep the majority of the profits from their music careers. As Napster was to Spotify, the experiment of PledgeMusic prepared the way for a sustainable sequel that’s inevitably coming.