British band Marillion are asking their fans to become their insurers for an upcoming UK tour due to a lack of suitable commercial insurance.

The band says they’ve invested more than £150,000 on preparations for the 10-date ‘The Light at The End Of The Tunnel’ outing, but risk losing it all if just one of member is forced to isolate with Covid.

The British government recently launched its long awaited £800 million insurance scheme for live events but it does not cover cancellation in the event of an artist or performer needing to self isolate.

“The tour would be cancelled, but the group would have to honour payments for lighting, trucks, tour buses and crew. This would be on top of not receiving any money from any remaining gigs that had not been played,” says the band.

Their solution is to set up a scheme called Lightsavers where fan pledges would provide a financial buffer, if needed.

“We’re asking our fans to pledge money that will be held in escrow and if it all goes Covid free it will be returned”

“We’re asking our fans to pledge money that will be held in escrow and if it all goes Covid free it will be returned to them at the end of the tour,” explains Lucy Jordache, the band’s manager.

“But if we do have to cancel, then their money will be used to pay the band’s unavoidable expenses.”

Fans who donate, regardless of if the money is needed or not by the band, will receive rewards determined by the size of their financial pledge, such as having their names appear in the tour programme or being given a download of a show from the tour.

There are a number of pledge tiers, ranging from £25 to £250, with the top two tiers already sold out.

This isn’t the first time Marillion has broken new ground using crowdfunding, according to Marillion frontman, Steve Hogarth: “[Fans] have come to our rescue before. Way back in 1997, they helped raise $60,000 to underwrite our entire US tour. It was the first noteworthy instance of online crowdfunding – a world first in fact. We also used the same method to underwrite some of our studio albums.”

Marillion’s tour begins at Hull’s City Hall on 14 November. For a full list of dates and venues go to www.marillion.com/tour.

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MyMusicTaste, a South Korean crowdsourcing platform for music and live events, has raised a further US$11m in ‘series-C’ investment, bringing its total funding to more than $22m.

The Seoul-based company, founded in 2012, aims to take the guesswork out of concert promotion by allowing fans to request artists visit their cities, giving promoters and artists an indication of demand in any given territory. The service now has more than 1.3m users worldwide, and works with 56 promoters and 30 booking agencies.

The company’s founder and CEO, Ethan JaeSeok Lee, tells TechCrunch the money will be put towards more than doubling the concerts it helps to plan in 2018, with the company aiming for 100 – up from 41 so far this year – and expanding into more genres. (It is currently a leader in bringing K-pop shows to the West – a fast-growing market for Korean music.)

Compared to the traditional model of concert planning, MyMusicTaste (MMT) places the onus on music fans to ‘make’ the shows in their cities, with other stakeholders coming on board when there is sufficient perceived demand. The company says it uses the number of requests to “forecast demand by artist and location, and supplies this information to promoters so that they can organise a successful event”.

The $11m will be put towards more than doubling the concerts MyMusicTaste helps plan in 2018

MMT users have so far successful crowdsourced more than 140 events in 32 cities, with non-Korean partner artists including The xx, Dream Theatre and Machine Gun Kelly.

The latest round of investment was led by KTB Network, with participation from other new investors Stonebridge and Yellow Dog. Previous backers Softbank Ventures Korea, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, Formation 8, Bokwang Investment and Golden Gate Ventures also returned for the series C.

The new investment will also help fund new regional offices in Los Angeles, Europe and south-east Asia and bolster MMT’s data science and engineering team.

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