Crowd-funding in music is normally about getting fans to buy (through contributing to the recording and promotional costs in advance) an album from an artist. Liz Longley, however, is turning to it to get her fans to help her buy her album back from her erstwhile label.

In the video on the project’s Kickstarter page she explains how she’d recorded a new album, Funeral For My Past, that she was proud of – but that she ran into problems with.

“I was pretty excited when I handed it into the label, but I guess you could say the label was caught in transition,” she says. “So this record – and I – got lost in the shuffle […] So I’m going independent again, but the next step is buying my own music back from the record label and raising enough funds to be able to promote it.” (Billboard reports that the label in question is Concord/Rounder after her previous label, Sugar Hill Records, was acquired by it.)

Longley set a target of $45,000 and broke down where that would be spent, with $35,000 alone going on the studio and mastering costs of making the album. To achieve this, she set a variety of funding tiers, including $1,000 for a studio listening party, $10,000 to executive produce a music video, $8,500 to have a song written and recorded for the pledger and $150 for handwritten lyrics (as well as more affordable packages like $15 for a digital copy of the album and $1 for a “virtual hi-five & a big hug next time I see you in person”).

In the end, she raised $150,007 – more than three times what she was looking to raise – from 1,302 backers.

There are many crowd-funding campaigns rolling at any one time and most have noble intentions that come with a bit of thought and effort put into them. But we especially liked this one because of how different it is coupled with the feel-good factor – all the more important in this space given how the recent and acrimonious collapse of PledgeMusic has soured this part of the business.