Another one of those 'fans fund the bands' services, Bandstocks, has announced that the MDs of London label B-Unique will act as consultants to the operation. The label's Mark Lewis and Martin Toher will vet all unsigned artists who register with the online service, and act as A&R advisors to those who successfully raise enough investment via the site to record an album. The involvement of the label execs, who have experience of both the indie and major sector (the latter through B-Unique's alliances with Universal and, more recently, Warner), is seen by Bandstock as a way of distinguishing their service from other fan investment sites like SliceThePie and Sellaband.
Commenting on the service, its founder, music lawyer Andrew Lewis, told CMU: "We have worked really hard to get the details of Bandstocks right. The rules about offering investments to the public are the same whether you are asking people to put in £10 or £10,000 and we don't take any of this stuff lightly. We also take our responsibilities to artists extremely seriously. Twenty years of haggling over record deals as a lawyer gives you a pretty good idea of what artists want a record contract to say and the Bandstocks deal may well be the world's first record deal written deliberately from the artist's point of view. We want to make it easy for artists to sign up to a Bandstocks deal - there are plenty of websites for unsigned, unsignable bands, but www.bandstocks.com isn't one of them. It's not that we don't believe in democracy, it just works better if you don't put 10,000 names on the ballot paper".