A few weeks ago I asked what people would think of a live Kingfisher album, and with the positive response we got we've started working on it in earnest. I made rough mixes, we listened through and picked our favorites, and we've started working with Dana to turn these into real tracks. This is going to cost money, though, and after talking to a bunch of musician friends it sounds like Kickstarter is still the best platform for this. So: consider backing our kickstarter?

What might this album cost? Some estimating:

$1,300	Mixing so far
$1,200	Remaining mixing, plus mastering (??)
$400	CD Manufacturing
$300	Photography
$200	Copyrights
$3,400	Total

This is about half what the 2014 Free Raisins CD. There's no expense for the recording, because we recorded ourselves over the past year as we played dances. We're also planning on doing the art and graphic design ourselves as well.

One risk with raising money on Kickstarter is that if you don't hit your goal you don't get anything. We could potentially ask for a smaller amount, and try to make up the difference over time from sales at dances, though people are less into buying physical CDs than they used to be, and I haven't had much success selling digital goods in person. To figure out what sort of amounts might be realistic I tried to gather the Kickstarters from as many contra dance bands as I could find. I pulled together:

Year	Band	Goal	Raised	Backers
2012	Trip to Nelson	$1,000	$1,200	28
2015	Nova	$6,750	$7,980	194
2015	The Ripples	$3,500	$3,840	74
2016	Toss the Possum	$4,600	$5,705	97
2017	Great Bear	$7,000	$10,111	239
2017	Buddy System	$7,000	$7,527	186
2018	Stringrays	$10,000	$14,696	295
2018	Countercurrent	$4,500	$5,121	104
2019	Nova	$8,500	$9,831	197
2020	Buddy System	$12,000	$13,185	260
2020	Back Porch Cafe	$1,800	$2,119	63
2020	Pete's Possee	$6,000	$6,837	127
2021	Celticladda	$2,970	$4,276	69
2022	Syncopaths	$12,000	$21,929	276

Kickstarter doesn't let you raise your goal after launching, so the "goal" column does accurately include initial project goals.

Looking at our projected costs and the amounts other bands have been able to raise we decided to set our goal at $3,000, which is ~85% of our likely costs.