Since the beginning of the pandemic, many people have asked us if they can support us financially to help us get through this stupid time. So far, we’ve always declined this, but we’re starting to gratefully accept some help in order to be able to cover necessary costs. Many bands and colleagues resort to options such as Getnext and Patreon, but for several reasons, we don’t want to do that at the moment.
Read here why we currently don’t want to go to Getnext or Patreon.
We want our contents to be available to anyone. We don’t want those people who are paying monthly subscription fees to be exclusively able to listen to our podcast, have access to certain photos or watch little backstage videos about us, listen to certain songs, and the like.
We know that among our fans there are many who could afford this without any problems, but also many who couldn’t. We think it’s discriminating to exclude the latter from access to any contents. Especially our podcast brings smiles to the faces of many people each week, and people without lots of money are in need of that, too.
Maybe it would be different in a newly started band, launching this subscription model right from the beginning, but for an established band like Solar Fake we think it would be unfair to exclude those fans who don’t have any extra money each month. Therefore, we count on a voluntary concept, giving the chance of making little contributions for our financial relief to those who want to and can do this without getting any direct reward, thus supporting the community of Solar Fake fans. We hope that this concept will find your approval and will somewhat shorten these hard times for us where we hardly have any income but still costs.
We hope you share this view and support our principle of solidarity without any discrimination. However, if anytime in the future we should have to deliver our music to our fans without a medium-size record company, we could be forced to change the overall concept and to develop a fair subscription system for all Solar Fake outputs. Although this is very unlikely to happen anytime soon, we don’t want to leave it unmentioned. Nobody knows how things will develop, when this situation will go back to normal, and which clubs and companies will still exist, and if they’ll still be able to operate as they did before. So we do need to keep this option open, although we’ll do everything to prevent it.
Unfortunately, the sales proceeds from our CDs cover the album production costs only, regardless of our charts success which doesn’t result in any financial benefits or higher profits. Usually we get along well by playing concerts and selling merchandise items at our concerts, but sadly this source of income has been reduced to an absolute minimum, as you know. You can support us by buying stuff at our online shop, and by coming to our concerts as soon as they’ll take place again, or you can support us financially starting from now.
With this money, we’ll cover costs incurred e.g., for the podcast, web hosting and website, essential and unfortunately pretty expensive software subscriptions, and many other costs incurring in the operation of a band. Should there be more money than is needed for this, it will be shared equally among the 3 musicians to help them get through this time. This is not a donation in the proper sense and it is not tax-deductible, because we are not a charitable organisation. It’s a private sponsoring.
