Floridian metal band Seven Kingdoms has made a career out of fan-backed releases, but that level of support didn’t happen overnight.
We live in an age where the barriers to creating high-quality content are unbelievably low. You can do more with your smartphone to build and manage a music career than a team of people could accomplish just thirty years ago, and you can do most of it without leaving your bed. The problem is figuring out how to pay for it, but if you ask Florida metal band Seven Kingdoms, they’d tell you that’s why fans matter.
Seven Kingdoms knew early on that they had a sound that people wanted to hear and, like most groups, believed a label would be the best path to widespread success. The band found a deal early on and used the added benefit of a promo team to build their reputation on a global scale. More releases followed, and the band continued to work its way through the metal hierarchy, but in the mid-2010s realized a change was needed.
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Now, as we all know, every group is different, and so is every career. What works for one artist will not work for others and vice versa. That’s the nature of the business. In 2016, after spending their first decade in the label system, Seven Kingdoms chose to go independent with the first of several crowdfunded releases. The group did not know how much support fans would offer, but the results speak for themselves. More than perhaps any American heavy metal band in the scene right now, Seven Kingdoms are beholden only to themselves and their audience. The only people they have to please are those who want to hear from them, and that’s where all musicians hope to find themselves.
We knew we had to speak with them when we caught wind of Seven Kingdoms’ long streak of successful crowdfunding efforts. Music Biz host James Shotwell called the band last week, and they were happy to share the secrets to their success. Check it out:
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