John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met at a school fete, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were childhood friends in the ’50s, while all five members of Radiohead attended the same school in Oxford. It seems most great things come from humble beginnings, but musician Cobus Potgieter, his group’s genesis will come from the internet.
Mashable reports that Potgieter, a drummer who is somewhat of a YouTube sensation with over 100 million combined views that see him playing renditions of popular songs, is now looking for a permanent band to write and record original music.
The Los Angelean is using various social media to achieve his goal. Starting with launching a Kickstarter project to bring together an assembly of musicians, using YouTube as the platform to audition the various applicants. Using a website extension, Potgeiter is taking the call for vocalists, guitarists, bassist, keys and synth players as well as songwriters.
Beginning with an initial target of $US 35,000 to send the final line-up to Los Angeles to write and record an album over a number of weeks, the campaign has now reached over $US 42,000, including one backer who accepted the $US 10,000 pledge to be the Executive Producer of the project as well a trip to LA for the recording and a number of other “crazy rewards.”
Potgeiter says on the Kickstarter website that “the core of this project is to reach out to the masses, accept auditions from completely unknown (but completely epic) musicians… choose and connect with the people that inspire me and that I have chemistry with.”
The drummer also has plans to document the entire process for a feature-length film to follow the finished album recording that social media has enabled. Adding that, “it is now possible to put together a band, make inspired music that comes from a place of freedom, and all of this without ANY pressure from record companies.”
“I’ve had this idea for so long, and I am more excited and passionate about this than I have been about almost anything else,” writes Potgieter of his unprecedented campaign, “I think that the size of this project is possibly miles above anything any independent musician has ever tried, and that makes this the most intimidatingly big idea I have ever had.”
Potgeiter is keeping open-minded about the musical direction of the finished outfit, hoping that the genre or style of the band will be determined not by his choosing, but guided instead by the musical identities that he collects.
His ambitious idea has already garnered an average of ten or more auditions over YouTube a day, and the drummer has also been reviewing his applicants with the aid of Google+, using it as a way of ‘getting to know’ his potential band.
Currently, submissions are exclusive to American residents, but Potgieter hopes that the growth and interest in his Kickstarter project will bring a worldwide opportunity in the future.
