Monday 29 December 2014

Djanan hits her target on the last day of appeal

Djanan Turan performing at Cafe Cairo. Photo by Silvia Cruz
NEWS/UK

A Turkish singer who turned to crowd-funding to help finance her new album has hit her target on the very last day of the appeal. Djanan Turan had given herself a month to raise the funding shortfall required to finish the recording of her new EP Maze. Her appeal on Kickstarter inched forward throughout December, only passing the £4,000 target with just a few hours to go before the Christmas Day deadline.

Hitmaker Raz Olsher to produce Djanan's new EP Maze 
Nearly 100 backers pledged a total of £4,007. Of these, 94 opted to receive a gift once the EP is completed early in 2015, with the remainder simply donating to help Djanan reach her target.

The funding means she can now pay for the remaining studio and production time for Maze, as well as the mixing, mastering and printing costs of the CDs. The talented singer-songwriter has employed Raz Olsher to produce her new EP. Olsher has previously topped the UK charts producing Sam and The Womp’s hit song Bom Bom in 2012.

Given the nail-biting finish, we asked Djanan how confident she was about reaching the target in time. She told T-VINE, “Believe me I’ve got no nails left! I always go for them under stress! I can’t say that I was confident. I picked a very difficult time, which I realised only after I launched it.”

Having had an unsuccessful effort trying to raise funding through PRS, she was not sure what to expect with Kickstarter:

[The fundraising] puts you in a weird psychology: you’re seeing the cup both half-full and half-empty Things can get a little bit schizophrenic as the deadline gets nearer, because it’s on an 'all or nothing' basis.”

Even though she spent a few weeks preparing for her campaign, it was still hard to envisage the level of work needed to keep the momentum going during her month-long appeal:

“It doesn't seem like it from the outside, but crowd-funding is a lot of work. Setting up your campaign nicely and properly obviously takes a while. Then the sharing! Seriously, I realised half way through how naive I had been to think that you get this out, do your best to get the word out and surely people will see it. It’s not like that. Everyday I’ve had to do emails, tweeting, instagramming – I don't think you can ever really do enough. Yet you don't want overdo it within the same group of people either.”

Now that she’s realised her funding target, in the New Year Djanan’s focus will move to finishing the EP and delivering the various gifts offered during her appeal:

“Every single pledge made me extremely happy, and I felt extremely grateful. I now need to deliver the rewards. It will be fun and I’m really looking forward to it. There are quite a few challenging ones, which you'll see soon on Youtube.”

And her verdict on crowd-funding?

“Despite the work side, and the freaking out bit, I loved it! I must say, I did struggle to properly keep up with the whole social media thing, but this gave me a better grasp of it, and a nice pace that I can carry on with. It’s connected me to loads of people from different times of my life and the support has been soooo heart-warming, honestly. It’s not just the money; I have received so much emotional support for the whole project, so many lovely messages. Thank you all”.

Follow Djanan's progress via her websitewww.djananturan.co.uk


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