If you've been following Wintersun's Facebook for the past few months, I'm sure you've seen one of the 100,000 teasers for the band's new album The Forest Seasons, as well as for the ensuing/somewhat related crowdfunding campaign. The band will be running the funding campaign throughout entire month of March, and is asking for a whopping €150,000.
Wintersun only offers one option for you to donate to the fund in which you'd receive perks, and that's a €50 package that includes the following downloads (nothing physical).
- A .wav download of the new album, The Forest Seasons.
- An "AMAZING 17-page 5K booklet crafted by Jari himself."
- An instrumental version of The Forest Seasons + instrumental stems.
- A remastered version of Time I and Wintersun.
- A live album Live At Tuska 2013, that's inexplicably only available as 320kbps .mp3 files.
- An acoustic version of "Loneliness" from The Forest Seasons.
Sure, for the diehard fan of Wintersun, I think that package is excellent. Though for the casual fan, or anyone who just wants The Forest Seasons at this point, it's a bit much for what essentially boils down to a ton of digital files.
So why €150,000? For a Wintersun headquarters, of course! More specifically, "All the raised funds will be used to build the Wintersun Headquarters. This will enable us to finish TIME II without compromises with our true vision!" However, this isn't just a home studio… the band is literally going to build a building for themselves, and that's going to cost €750,000.
We've consulted professional construction companies and studio builders and gotten the estimated budget:
- The property 100.000 €
- The building 250.000 €
- Construction of the studio 150.000 €
- Additional costs: Finnish taxes (& Indiegogo platform fee 5% + credit card fee 3%) 250.000 €
- Total: 750.000 €
To raise all this funding we are planning to do three massive crowdfunding campaigns like this first one. Each one with a different massive 50 € package. We hope to reach 5000 loyal Wintersun fans per each campaign, which is the ideal goal. (The future campaigns will be planned and scheduled according to the result of this first campaign).
So yeah, there's going to be two more of these, so Wintersun can build Wintersun City, just like every other band has ever needed in order to make an album. Granted, I don't know what exactly Time II is going to entail, but demanding your own headquarters in order to properly create an album seems excessive. Time I sounded great, and aren't there more than enough professional resources at this point in time to properly re-create symphonies, choirs, and other instruments? Bands like Septicflesh and Dimmu Borgir have been doing it for years without a full-on personal studio, but again – maybe Time II is something else. I really couldn't tell you.
Wintersun also says the headquarters will serves as a rehearsal space, a place to film videos, and so on and so forth.
Additionally, having our own Wintersun Headquarters studio & rehearsal place will help us to work more efficiently on other things like music videos, rehearsal videos, studio videos and video updates for you. Having our own place will also help us to improve our live production for bigger and better live shows, perhaps with a real orchestra someday and doing a live video recording of it which has also been a long time dream of ours! So let's make all these things happen guys! You have the power to help us!
Part of me commends the band's dedication to their craft, because having your own building would truly help out in all these regards… but to ask your fans for what will nearly amount to the equivalent of $800,000 is pretty excessive, especially for a band who ultimately has released two albums. To me, it seems like you're paying for the band to have its own headquarters to put out albums that it could ultimately put out all by itself without all this. Wintersun has now recorded three albums without its own headquarters, and even remastered of two of them without the headquarters, not to mention has put on live shows for 10+ years, all without a headquarters. So why all of a sudden is this something that needs to happen, lest we all want to see the demise of Wintersun?
I know, it's all "for the fans" and we'll get more music, yada yada. Of course I'm going to snag The Forest Seasons and Time II, but through Nuclear Blast, when I can get a physical copy and not have to shell out $50+ for digital files. Wintersun is definitely a great band, but as I've said before, I'm not really so sure why a headquarters is needed.
Though as silly as I think these demands are, Wintersun is already hovering around €151,000 in under 24 hours, so clearly I'm in the minority here.
Plus, Nuclear Blast is letting it happen, so clearly this benefits them in some way or another… or they're just tired of not being able to release a new Wintersun album. If you're not really into donating to the campaign, which you can do right here, Nuclear Blast will be releasing physical copies of The Forest Seasons in July.
