Why we are here - De Wallen Story

Hey guys, so my name is Pieter, I run the De Wallen (BAND) Steemit page for the band. You might think it's a weird platform for musicians to be on but there is actually a decent support base on here for the music, however, that is not the reason we are here.

                           Oh, btw this is me below.

So my eldest brother got me into cryptocurrencies and trading a few years back, I was making good money but because I was young and dumb I was also spending good money. I have now taken up a new approach to trading where I try to never withdraw my cash but rather build myself a decent portfolio of coins. Currently, I mostly trade in Swarm, BTC, ETH and now Steem also I have some small penny stocks that I'm keeping on the long hold. I feel its good to have a little bit of everything rather than a lot of one thing to cover yourself overall if any coin takes a big knock.

If you want to check out my brothers page or give him a follow just check out: @stephtv

So having a small amount of knowledge on how crypto's work and an expensive product to fund, I had a breakthrough. My brother had been telling me a lot about Steemit but I was never really reluctant to try it out until one day I was chatting with him while he was running through his blogs. His account was and is still quite new but I saw the potential that the platform had, not only for the community but for my band. Then it happened...

We had committed ourselves to a list of two things to do before the end of 2018.

Firstly: Release a third full-length album.

We won our first album by winning the Aandklas Battle of the bands, so it didn't cost us anything. - You can listen to it here.

Our second album was self funded, we borrowed money and got venues to pay us in advance for shows. Even though this was only a 5 track album it racked up a bill of R60 000 ($4700 at current exchange rate) in total, that took us about a year to pay off. - You can listen to it here
or buy it here.

The third album we are looking at doing is a full album and we might even print vinyl copies. The full project is going to cost us about R100 000 ($7800 at current exchange rate)

Secondly: Tour Internationally, we have been dreaming for the last 6 years to go international and try our luck in either Europe or The States. We finally got a reputable booking agent for Europe and we will now be touring The Netherlands and Germany from the 29th of November - 16th of December in 2018. This, however, comes with a lot of costs, for starters his booking fee, our visa's and flight tickets. Then when we get there we need to pay for accommodation, food and drink, transport, and gear rentals.
We are estimating this tour to cost us about R120 000 ($9350 at current exchange rate)

That means we need to get together a lot of money... R100 000 + R120 000 = R220 000 to be exact or $17 150 (At the current exchange rate.) ... DAMN THAT A LOT OF MONEY...

Imagine how many packs of two-minute noodles we could buy... like a 100 000 packs...

Anywho we are getting off topic, so our plan was to play a lot of show and tours, do a crowd funding and sell a lot of cd's/merch.

That is where Steemit comes in, we could still do all of those things but if we could share our media and stories on here and grow our brand to get some more fans and even make a few bucks that would just be a massive relief.

The band has already put together R5000 ($400 at current exchange rate) with tour profits and $26.07 from iTunes and streaming. That means only $16 723,93 to go!!!

Each member will be giving x amount per month to the expenses as well and we still have a year and a half to go, but please if you feel that you would want to, upvote, donate, resteem or just buy the album here. Every little bit of help means the world to us.

If you'd like to know some more about the band check out our introduction post here: https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@dewallenband/welcome-to-the-mayhem-introducing-a-brief-history-of-de-wallen

Also please go and check out our entry into Open Mic Week 36 hosted by @luzcypher and supported by @pfunk. If we could win that, it would help a lot towards our target: https://steemit.com/openmic/@dewallenband/open-mic-week-36-de-wallen-means-to-an-end

Love from the entire squad here at De Wallen, and just Live a Little.