South African singer Verity Price found it hard to get a recording contract in South Africa. As featured on Carte Blanche, music producer Peter Lacey explained that the market for English speaking music in South Africa is less than 500 000 people and this includes international artists. A successful record in South Africa is considered selling 5 000 units. Besides releasing an album there is the added tasks of getting radio stations to play the music and getting retailers to sell the album.

With a mamoth task of convining record companies to give her a recording contract, Vertity took on a novel approach to getting her album funded. A website along with a blog was setup and people were asked to purchase her album before she recorded it. The online campaign included getting bloggers to write about it, MySpace and Facebook were also used to garner support with all these websites linking back to her website.

An added incentive for those who bought the album was that they got to vote which songs she recorded and their names were listed on her website. They also recieved a limited addition album. Verity managed to sell 2 000 albums before it was released and it covered all her costs. The album was released without any debt associated with it and it contributed nearly R30 000 to charity. What Verity managed to do is known as crowfunding. Crowdfunding is one of the models of crowdsourcing as described in Jeff Howe’s book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Wikipedia defines crowdfunding as:

collective cooperation, attention and trust by people who network and pool their money together, usually via the Internet, in order to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations. Crowdfunding occurs for any variety of purposes, from disaster relief to citizen journalism to artists seeking support from fans, to political campaigns.

In the case of Verity the crowd replaced the need for a record company to provide funding. Crowdfunding reduces the reliance on funding institutions to provide capital. Verity also introduced a way for the crowd to participate by voting which songs appeared on the album. The crowd were not just given the final product they had an opportunity to participate in the creation process.