fundraising for metafilter

Hey! As you may know, metafilter is in a shaky position financially, and is doing a big fundraiser this month. aielen from the metafilter steering committee reached out to see if the music zone might be up for doing some fun fundraising activities between now and early December. This is a thread for music-related fundraising ideas.

aielen writes:

We're open to all sorts of ideas/ways this might work (e.g. listening party of MeFi music highlights, review of looptober, online music concert, inviting MeFites to talk about their music-making process, etc), and it would be up to what you'd feel comfortable doing.

posted by moonmilk (8 comments total)

For myself, since I do mostly weird experimental sound stuff, and I like weird experimental challenges, I was thinking of selling music by the second - e.g. a donation of $20 gets a 20 second piece. Maybe you want to join me in this? Or maybe you have some less weird ideas! Whatever we volunteer to do, the steering committee can publicize it elsewhere on the site.

For example, here's some more nice suggestions from aielen:

What if we just had something like a Metafilter Fundraising EP/ Music Collection? MeFi music volunteers could submit music - maybe people could donate towards being able to suggest themes.

So for example someone could put up $10 towards a brief of "Electronic track with cow sounds, sampling Jessamyn's voice from the podcast" (just as an example :P ), and a MeFi music volunteer could make a track like that. The brief could be kept reasonable - like maybe 3 bulletpoints (1 for genre, 1 for some sort of sound/instrument/voice to be incorporated, and then 1 kept open (for anything like lyrics to some sort of general description/story, or another sound element request)).

And then at the end of the fundraising drive this could all be compiled into an EP / album, the general community can opt to purchase the album (all proceeds going to Metafilter), and we could do an online listening party to conclude? (And maybe some musicians could explain how they came up with the tracks during the online session.)

posted by moonmilk at 10:03 AM on November 13, 2022

I am funding Metafilter monthly (again) but I'd be more apt to raise that if the site would finally add music to Fanfare. I long for discussions around music - there are often great discussions around music in AskMe threads when people ask for suggestions, etc.

I've suggested this a few times and got shot down. It bums me out that we have book, TV and movie discussion but not music.
posted by jzb at 7:22 AM on November 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

sorry, back here for the first time in ages so forgive the intrusion, but just thinking about what might get traction in addition to the good ideas here. maybe responding to requests for remixes in the style of might get traction from the wider mefi community? particularly done with a pinch of salt. disposable/silly/funny experiments.
posted by nthdegx at 7:10 AM on November 17, 2022

a live online dj-athon solely/largely featuring downloads from mefi music?
posted by nthdegx at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2022

nthdegx - I love the idea for a live online (livestreaming?) DJ-athon! do you think that's possible, or would you be able to do something like that?
posted by aielen at 6:19 AM on November 20, 2022

i think so! technically these things are quite easy now, i think. Twitch might be a good option, for example. my DJing leaves a lot to be desired, so the more the merrier on that score, but perhaps song selection can make up for lack of technical proficiency.
posted by nthdegx at 2:38 AM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

If we did a compilation album of any kind, I'm down to contribute.
posted by limeonaire at 1:02 PM on September 15, 2023

I came back here for the first time in yonks and found this thread, what a great bunch of ideas.

I'll add two:

- years ago we did a MeFiMusic raffle, where any MeFite could make a request for something (eg. this TV theme tune but done in death metal style, a cover of that song but lofi, stuff like that) and I just shunted them out to everyone for fun. We could do this again but for donations?

- jzb, your wish for music discussion made me wonder if we might do sponsored FPPs about music? So like - tell me your favourite album, song or band and donate enough, and I'll do an amazing FPP about it that will get people talking.

Also, I miss you guys! I've had two kids and a run of bad health, but one of these days I'm going to get back around these parts so much you'll be sick of me.
posted by greenish at 1:28 PM on March 20