Lester's Time Has Come Today | Hacker News Reader

Lester's Time Has Come Today

kickstarter.com

76 pointsdanielpal18 comments

Lovely narrative, but there is nothing about the music! No examples, no mention of the direction the record will take.

I suggest they fix this because it's just a call to charity without it.

I think it said he has previously released over 10 albums. Listen to those to get an idea of what the new album will sound like. If the money is to fund studio time etc. there's obviously not very much he can share at this stage.

Yeah, it's going to be a bunch of soul classics in the public domain as well as a lot of original music. Given his history with the labels, we didn't want to take any risks with audio content in the campaign.

Here's a taste! He still rocks (in his 70s!) and was even almost able to teach me cowbell after just a day together.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22lester+chambe...

Bless you for taking up the cause of the soul classics and one of their great original creators. It's astonishing how good that music was and is.

It really holds up. My dad raised me on the Stones, Hendrix, Joplin, and Dylan -- the influence the Chambers Brothers had on soul, and rock, and blues and even the freaking cowbell and on and on is commendable. And I barely grok music.

True story, I've been on the train for the past hour just hitting repeat on Time Has Come Today.

And thanks. We're far from done, but I'm really hopeful the internet can pull through and give Lester what he deserves.

I get what they're trying to do, but the fact of the matter is that it's one person. Alexis is talking about this as though it's going to revolutionize the music industry, when in fact it really won't. It will certainly help Lester Chambers, who almost certainly deserves some love, but to think that this will turn around an industry is absurd. It just seems to me that they're putting this profound label of "beating the music industry" because that's what's popular right now, and will generate more buzz. If you want to support the guy, by all means go ahead, but don't think that you're changing anything about the way the music industry works, you're just supporting the artist.

"will generate more buzz"

Is that not an adequate reason for this? Humans need to see human faces, not just abstract arguments. This isn't going to win the fight overnight, but it's more than just helping a guy and probably one of the more effective ways of fighting the fight for public opinion that you could come up with.

Kickstarter definitely seems like the way for independent artists to raise money to produce an album. However when I saw Google's new YouTube studios in Los Angeles I couldn't help but think that maybe that's the future. Content companies funding producers and taking a cut of the revenue from the content when it is distributed on that platform (but allowing the artist to keeps the rights to the content). I read somewhere that before record companies it was the very rich who commissioned artists to produce work. Maybe we will see that model start to reappear but instead of individuals commissioning work it will be content companies.

Remember - these funding platforms did not exist a few years ago, and a few years before that neither did 'social media.'

What makes me so optimistic is that we're still so early and already thousands (tens of thousands?) of albums alone are getting funded that simply never would have before -- and that's just on kickstarter.

I can absolutely imagine a world of 'micro-patronage' where a small monthly contribution (something we see working wonders with http://awesomefoundation.org) to an artist you like starts looking like a real income when micro-patrons number in the thousands or tens of thousands. These patrons get access to exclusive, personal content and first dibs on all the art they want said artist to be free to produce.

Again, this doesn't work for everyone. None of these will work for everyone. But they're all examples of progress that gets us further from the broken music industry model that preyed on artists like Lester.

He had me up until the "I am the 99%". I thought we were finally through with that.

It mentions that he posted that picture in the spring - I think it's a bit dated. Though the Vice article cited in the Kickstarter makes it seem that the 99%/Occupy references were serendipitous - he would have been trying to publicize what happened regardless (http://www.vice.com/read/screwed-over-by-the-music-industry-...)

You can kick political organizers out of parks. You can even arrest and injure them. But you can't kill an idea.

I think the goal of the campaign is to plant the seed in the general public that record labels bankrolling capital for artists to produce albums is no longer needed with today's current technology.

Kickstarter is just one platform. I could see this inspriring a hacker/musical artist to build a Kickstarter-like platform specifically for musical artists to raise capital for new albums and connect directly with fans. I could also see that same website providing a ticketing platform where people could back a show in a specific city to try to get an artist to come to their hometown instead of selling through TicketMaster and having scalpers buy up all the inventory.

Also, even with platforms like Kickstarter or payment processors like Stripe, the important thing is that the artists retain the rights to their songs, instead of the record labels purchasing them through investment. I've heard that most artists make most of their money off royalties from 2 or 3 hits songs.

> I think the goal of the campaign is to plant the seed in the general public that record labels bankrolling capital for artists to produce albums is no longer needed with today's current technology.

It really isn't if you already have somewhat of a following. A band I listen to has funded their past two albums on kick starter and the tours associated with them. The idea they went with is, "Prepay for our music, once it is recorded we will release it for free and not prosecute pirates."

This allowed them to completely avoid worrying about piracy or anything like that. I've linked their previous Kickstarter below. I doubt many here will enjoy their music (Christian noise rock. [note, I'm not Christian.]) but people might be interested in seeing how they operated their Kickstarter and their business model.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Showbread/showbread-canc...

I wonder, isn't there something like frivolous contracts? So that even if you sign away the rights to your music while you are young, the law would still somehow protect you?

From his wikipedia page:

> His Facebook posting received over 2,500 "likes" and over 2,000 "shares" in the first 15 hours on his "Wall"

Clearly the problem has already been solved.

This is a good example of how not to comment on HN. This is being a jerk for the sake of it.

Lester Chambers is a great soul musician. You may not have heard of him before this, but I sure have. There are probably a lot of reasons why he didn't win the pop culture lottery, but one of them is the long, shameful history of exploitation of artists, a history that you must not know anything about or you wouldn't have posted something that makes you look so mean. There is nothing to gloat about here.

Admirable goal, but so sad to see this being done and Lester getting screwed over yet again. Who gets a big chunk of every transaction? The payment processor. For providing what? Transferring several numbers from one place to another over the Internet - a service worthless for its ease. And they charge a percentage, regardless of the fact that transferring larger numbers does not increase their costs.

Without payment processors that charge a very low FLAT RATE for processing, we're not improving anything by transitioning to an economy wherein they get to skim off a percentage of every single transaction that ever takes place.

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