Crowd-funding is really rather new in Singapore, and though a few couple other artists have tried it (Inch Chua, Charles J Tan), many music lovers still do not know what it really is about, or know how they can be involved.
Hence, I was fortunate to have MyPaper feature my new album’s fund-raising efforts with Pledgemusic, and to my surprise, a bonus dropped from the sky – Hoomia contacted me and told me the good news that they wanted to sponsor 3 headphones for me to sell them to my fans. When I hear about that, I was ecstatic, cos what a brilliant idea it is!
I was allowed to customise my headphones, and though i was a little worried about the designs, I went for it anyway; afterall, I’m a singer-songwriter and not a designer, so anything too fanciful would be too commercialised, so simplicity is probably key!
All 3 designs for the customised Hoomia headphones:
In the end I decided not to sell them, but to ‘pay it forward’. I kept feeling the goodness in my heart, and instead of cashing it in, I thought that it would be better to reward my most loyal and most deserving fans. But having said that, here was the most arduous process – not the designing of it, but picking the final 3 fans to award the headphones to! Because I could only choose based on what the fans wrote (“Why you should win the headphones”), I had very few factors I could consider besides that!
In the end I decided on these 3 awesome people:
Klaudia – she got the headphones because she begged her mum to write in to me; she’s a budding young violinist, and I hope that the headphones would spur her music-learning on!
Poh Peng – he first shared with me on how he brought a girl whom he was interested in to watch my concert, and she agreed to be his girlfriend the next day. Unfortunately, they’re no longer together, but my new songs and my interview with UFM1003 brought him comfort and inspirations.
Thom – he started off as a huge fan for my French album ‘Bistro Affair’, and write in every now and then with words of encouragement, not to say the least for this latest album. He branded himself as the ‘biggest fan in USA’ – oh well, I couldn’t say no to that!
I’d like to thank Hoomia again for their kind support, in return here’s a video I did for them!
Bevlyn Khoo 邱意淋 