Promising Newcomers: My First Robot

50K MM: Who are you, where do you come from, …? Please tell us something about My First Robot.
Ivan: This is a bit complicated. I (Ivan) came to Trier, Germany because of a job offer in Luxembourg. Since I spend most of my time making music I instantly started searching for a suitable band. Luckily Jim (vocals, guitars) noticed my ad in a local magazine and contacted me. This happened in September 2009. Jim already had a band with Stefan (drums) and Christian (bass) but they wanted to do something new, something that differs from the generic rock band sound. So we started to experiment a bit, wrote a few songs and it seems we might have found our own genre or style: A bit of rock, a lot of electronics and catchy vocals.

50K MM: How did you discovered SellaBand?
Ivan: I actually already knew about SAB before. I had a project there but since back then I was based in Hungary I couldn’t do much to get attention. Most people in the east don’t or wont believe in the concept. It is much easier to get people involved in Germany or the Benelux.

50K MM: How are you going to convince people to believe (and invest) in you?
Ivan: We have a good plan. It’s simple and we are really pushing things to happen. Just in February we wrote and recorded two new songs and had our first photo shooting. We are only raising 10k and I think that’s achievable in one year. We are also constantly looking into ways of getting fans more involved; we have a principle to give everyone a CD for free who comes to our show. Since you buy the ticket you should get a CD. Investing in ourselves is another important point. Even if we have to cover half of the 10k we are happy because fans helped us raising money.

50K MM: You have raised about 2% of the budget so far. Have you thought about the time after reaching the goal of 10k yet? What are your plans then?
Ivan: As soon as we reach our goal we are going to hit the studio without delay. By then we will have all the songs written that we want to put on the album. When we have the CD ready we are going to hit the road and tour Europe. On the tour we will massively promote and give away our CD on each show. Since this is our first album it has to be perfect and basically free for people who pay to see us.

50K MM: And last question: How can we support you to speed up raising your budget?
Ivan: These are hard times for bands on SAB. Believers are busy pulling money out of projects and it is very hard to convince people to invest in us. I think being in the 50k mag is great for a start. The best way to support us is to invest. We think that SAB is a great concept and it should work when the people behind it have the proper knowledge. But most importantly we need to make great music and there’s still a long way to go.

www.sellaband.com/projects/myfirstrobot

Tags: My First Robot