Thank you for the advice and support Rüdiger, I appreciate your thoughts on the matter.
Katagory V closing it's doors wasn't entirely due to the campaign failing by itself… it was due to the band no longer being financially sustainable to operate looking forward. The point of the campaign was to see if the band was still relevant and if we had a large enough fan base to support us and continue on. We are not doing this to make money, however, it still costs money to create our music, and even though it does not cost much money to do it… it still is expensive enough to make it difficult for the band to continue.
Here is the "behind the scene" story - Maybe it will shed some light on the decision to why I put Katagory V to rest:
The band actually broke up about 3 years ago… it was never officially announced, we just quietly passed on. This happened due to becoming disappointed with shopping the new album for over a year, and having no label interest, then the economy going to shit, and no one in the band being able to afford to even buy drums heads or guitar strings, let alone have the money to release the album ourselves and compete on the level of our past albums or among our peers. Thus, why there was no news for a very long time before the campaign started.
Earlier this year, all the band members in Katagory V started talking about wanting to release the 5th album somehow, and felt a crowd sourcing campaign would be the best and only option. We honestly thought that because we had sold between 500-1000 units each of our past albums (not including digital sales), that getting about 300+ of those fans to contribute the bare minimum of $15 would be no problem. If the campaign succeeded, we would continue on… if it failed, we would then officially disband.
So as you can see, we only had 90 people contribute… granted, that si still good, and some of them were die-hard and contributed a lot more than others, but it just wasn't enough. This showed us that we are no longer relevant, that we have lost touch with our fan base and that heavy metal fans were no longer interested in Katagory V.
It also did not help that most of the usual media outlets refused to post any news on the campaign. Only a few places did so when there was three days left, but by then it was almost too late. We had to rely on our mailing list, Social media and our fans to spread the word.
What we found the most interesting in the end, was that over the years, a majority of our past albums sales and fans were always located in Europe - Germany and Greece to be specific. Yet, this is how the contributions broke down at the end -
78% - United States
11% - Mexico/South America
4% - Germany
3% - Greece
2% - Scandinavia
2% - other
…this totally surprised us. It was a total contradiction to what we had known. The only thing we can think of was that there was a possible language barrier for our non-english speaking fans, and they didn't understand or know what was going on.
Anyway, yes since the album is indeed recorded, mixed and mastered, we are currently discussing (or rather, the other band members are trying to convince me) about releasing the 5th album as digital-only. I am looking at the options on this and will think about it over the next few weeks. If I do allow this, I might even allow the ofical release the 1st album "Present Day" as a digital only re-release as well, which has not happened yet… so that could be good. :-)
In the meantime, I am taking a small vacation and will being working on two new studio projects with some of the former members of Katagory V at the beginning of 2015. Hopefully there will also be some new music/news from Tramontane (with former members of Kat V and Imagika). So, it's not really the end… just a new beginning. :-)
Cheers!
Dustin
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