If you had access to funding via Steem and could use it for a local arts project… What would you do?
The funding and time-scale are flexible. This is vague on purpose to give you room to think - it could be a small, one night project. Or it could be a huge, expensive, ambitious project.
What I Might Do With Steem Funds
There have been some very interesting behind-the-scenes developments in my life… and so I’m brainstorming new ideas. Phase one, early ideation stuff. What would I do with some steem funding? Here are a few ideas that come to mind:
Idea #1: Sponsoring a weekly or monthly local music event
Inside of Slim’s, one of Raleigh’s most popular music venues
Where I live in Raleigh, there a lot of great venues in the 100-200 capacity range. These are the spots that smaller national acts or popular local acts can play, and fill the place up. It’s not easy to run a venue - they often rely on sponsorships, drink sales, and art grants to make the numbers work.
A simple and effective way to spread the word about Steem would be to sponsor a music night, somewhere in the range of once a week to once a month. Entrance could be free, the bands could be paid, and there could be a Steem Recruitment station where local musicians learn about the service and have the option to sign up on the spot.
The deal would work best if some Steem signage / posters would go up 24/7, so that even on off nights visitors to the venue would be reminded of us. Over the course of a year of events, I could imagine hundreds of local musicians being integrated into Steem.
Raleigh’s art scene could become a “Steem Scene,” reaching a tipping point where the majority of the popular musicians are active on Steem… and as steem grows, the bands’ income would grow too, leading to a large number of nationally touring acts evangelizing about the Steem platform.
Idea #2: A Steem-Powered Record Label
There’s a lot of affordable studio time to be had in the Raleigh-Durham area. A full day of recording can be funded for a few hundred dollars… you could feasibly fund an entire record by a popular local band for under $1,000.
Combine cheap studio time with affordable promotion opportunities such as Submithub (https://www.submithub.com/) - and you’ve got a situation where a band on the verge of national success can record an album for free, keep the rights, and get promoted as a Steem-funded project. This is the kind of thing that leads to national coverage - “bands are turning to new funding via the blockchain” - and could get a lot more musicians aware of the Steem blockchain.
This idea needs successful promotion to work.. you need to catch a Fugazi or an Arcade Fire in the making, a young band about to take off… and make it happen via steem. It’s a gamble with a potentially huge reward. What if the first blockchain band to make it big happens through Steem?
Idea #3: Sponsoring a DIY Venue
Why fund a music NIGHT when you can fund a whole venue? There are a few house venues around town, some of which would absolutely thrive with a few thousand bucks of funding. Imagine that you’ve got a house which doubles as a venue, putting on 3-5 shows a night, doubling as a DIY recording studio… and it’s funded by an up-front Steem donation plus continued upvote support.
Some of the bigger whales on this site earn hundreds of dollars per day from their posts… that’s more than enough to fund the best house venue in Raleigh - which, I should add, is in the top 3 fastest growing cities in the country.
If a great house venue existed, and was a “Steem Venue” - complete with daily updates on the blockchain - and recruiting bands (local and otherwise) - offering a place for touring bands to sleep, perhaps doubling as a studio by day… This could be huge.
You could be recruiting 1-2 bands per DAY onto the blockchain - that’s potentially hundreds of bands a year, so thousands of people per year, all entering onto the ecosystem. Focus on DIY, subversive bands, who may struggle to get funding any other way, and you’ve got a recipe to build an entire international scene of steem evangelists.
This idea, so far, seems like the most bang for the buck. You could feasibly fund a house venue for an entire year on $50 to $100 worth of upvotes per day, and recruit tons of up-and-coming bands to the blockchain. You’d be paying local & touring musicians, supporting Raleigh’s music economy in a sustainable way.
Your Turn
If you had access to Steem funding - what would you do? What project would you want to start?
Just thinking… but thinking is the first step to acting.
