I Fight Dragon$

Who says music can't prosper in this economy? Local nerd power-pop-rockers I Fight Dragons just raised a cool $10,000 for their band in under 48 hours. They offered fans a chance to buy a lifetime subscription to the band's music -- including anything and everything they ever release -- for $100, and limited the number of available subscriptions to 100.

When we saw this offer we thought it was a plucky move by the group. Considering the problem other artists have had in their own fund-raising efforts (we're never going to see that book on '90 Chicago rock, are we?) we wrote it off as a neat idea that was more successful as a publicity move.

Obvious we underestimated the band's fan-base! For that we're quite happy. Granted, you can't just strut out there and offer this sort of thing without first giving fans a taste, but I Fight Dragons were already doing an exemplary job of offering fans and mailing list members a steady stream of free high-quality MP3s while leveraging social media to deepen their connections with their audience. We view this latest move as the payoff for all that community building and we hope that this provides an example for other groups to follow in the future.