Long before American musician Amanda Palmer made her million dollars through Kickstarter, Japanese metal band Electric Eel Shock was raising money from its fans. And now the band's bassist, Kazuto Maekawa, wants to show the rest of Japan how it's done.
In 2004, the Samurai 100 project, dreamed up by the band's British then-manager Bob Slayer and inspired by British band Marillion's fan-funding success seven years prior, plucked ￡10,000 (around ¥1.9 million at the time) from the pockets of EES supporters in the West by offering advance copies of its forthcoming album, a lifetime place on the guestlist to the band's shows and other exclusive perks in exchange for a ￡100 (¥19,700) upfront payment. Only the most die-hard fans, the first 100, would be admitted.
The scheme worked so well that the band repeated it in 2007, and then in 2009 it signed up with the then-Dutch (now German) crowd-funding service SellaBand to raise a staggering $50,000 (around ¥4.8 million) from 3,000 fans in over 40 countries in order to record its sixth album, "Sugoi Indeed."
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