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Business News Digital
PledgeMusic still hoping for a buyer, still planning to go into administration
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 21 June 2019
PledgeMusic’s board remains hopeful that the company can be saved through acquisition, although it still expects to the business to fall into administration.
The latest update is the first from the collapsing crowdfunding platform for a month and was delivered in a short statement to Hypebot. “PledgeMusic is still pursuing a sale (which if it happens is likely to be via an administration) but has contingency plans for other insolvency processes if that is not achievable”, it said.
It was confirmed early last month that Pledge was heading into administration after negotiations with a possible buyer fell through. However, since then none of the necessary paperwork to begin the winding up of the business have been filed.
There has also been little formal communication in the intervening weeks, save for one update on the PledgeMusic website stating that “the company continues to work with outside counsel on the most appropriate next steps”.
At that time, it also provided artists on the platform with links via which they could download their fan data. What most of those artists want, however, is the money that they are owed from their crowdfunding and pre-order campaigns.
PledgeMusic had been struggling to pay that money to artists for months before operations were suspended at the beginning of the year. For some artists, this has left them unable to deliver the music promised to fans, or it has significantly limited how they can deliver it.
Those artists are now left in limbo, not knowing if they will ever see the money that they are owed. Their only hope was if a new owner might take on those liabilities, which would be one way to begin to rebuild goodwill towards the company.
However, if the whole thing does fall into administration, it seems likely that artists will be added to the bottom of a long list of creditors and may never receive any of the cash handed over to PledgeMusic by their fans.
