How do you guys feel about singalongs? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, she's the impossible girl, the impossible girl. Hey, hey, hey, hey, she's the impossible girl, the impossible girl. I'm Kim Bookbinder. I know all about failure because I've called myself the impossible girl. And last year I had to reinvent touring. So I was on this tour of the US and I was playing in Portland, Oregon. The venue had a capacity of about two to three hundred people. There were eighteen people in the room. Independent musicians played at empty rooms all the time. It just happens. But this was happening a lot on this tour and the thing is that I'm actually famous. Like most people don't know who I am but to the people who know me I'm a superstar. Andy Warhol said that in the future everybody would be famous for fifteen minutes. But I see that as well as this big bang of super concentrated fame for a short time, you can take that concentrate and spread it very very thinly over a longer period of time. So you get this micro fame and it's not that there's lots and lots of people who think I'm kind of cool. It's that there's a few people who think I'm intergalactic. I have thousands of fans all over the world who've been funding my albums, my short films, my videos, I make my living as a musician without any label or management which makes me an unprecedented independent success. Which is why. Thank you. It's very confusing to play to an empty room in a town that knows who I am and it's not just confusing to me it's confusing to the people who do show up. To the people who drove 200 miles to the girl who's been waiting four hours she's got a tattoo of my face on her arm it's intense. So that night I took the $12 I earned. Luckily it takes about $12 to get me drunk in Portland, Oregon. And I went and I thought about these disparate realities. The one where I'm a superstar with loyal fans and the ones where I'm an abject failure with no live audience. And in between these realities there's a terrifying chasm of self doubt. In the old days there was a system. I would have been picked up by a label and they would have promoted me and essentially paid for my audience. I don't live in the old days. And a label might as well be amassed it onto me. An extinct, slightly magical creature whose fat could help sustain me through the winter or who could trample me to death. I don't even have time to worry or wonder about whether that system was better or not because I'm too busy solving my own problems. The problem is that I need to tour but the cost of touring is debilitating. So me and the whiskey had a little talk that night. And we thought okay if we can crowdfund and essentially sell an album before we record it maybe we can sell a show before we book it. Using Kickstarter I said I will play a show on this date somewhere in New York. I need this much money. The show got funded immediately. And then I got press all over the world because it turns out nobody has ever done this before. Suddenly I was getting hundreds of emails a day. People calling me a genius and saying why haven't we always been doing it this way. It was like the entire internet looked at me and then started talking about my failure. And then started talking about my success because then I did a whole tour of the U.S. This time to rooms filled with excited engaged audiences. And because I knew my audience size beforehand I got to book appropriate venues. I didn't have to worry about how many people were going to show up or if I was going to break even I got to put on an amazing show. Which is my actual job. And to the people who came to those shows it was amazing. So the best part of the pre-sold tour is that everybody is winning. The audience gets an amazing show. They feel totally invested. The musician gets an audience. And the venue gets an audience. And when everybody in the room is winning that's the best feeling in the world. So it turns out that selling a show and then booking it is totally insane. And there's a reason that nobody's done it before. That's okay. It's still winning because the problems happen before the show. Which is fundamentally different than how concerts are usually booked. Because bands cancel tours all of the time because their ticket sales aren't going well enough. But they don't call it a pre-sold tour. But because of this thing we call crowdfunding we now get to be really honest and say hey we've always been crowdfunded. But now we get to know our audience size and it doesn't matter what your budget is. If you know what your budget is. I'm working with a company right now. It's a bit of a secret. But they'll be launching a pre-sold tour website really soon. Which is great news for fans and musicians. And it's great news for me because it means I get to move on to my next failure. Thank you.