It seems like a brilliant parry against music piracy, in the abstract: Set up a website where fans, not record labels, pay the cost of making an album for the band they like.

They contribute a little at a time, in the style of the Obama campaign, and eventually the band collects enough to start recording. Later, the band splits the profits with both the fans and the website.

At the very least, the thinking goes, a group doesn't have to fork over most royalties to a label and could make more than if it lets fans decide what to pay.

The latest site to adopt this playbook—following Sellaband and Slicethepie—is Bandstocks, a British startup that debuted this month. It asks fans to invest £10 at a time in artists.

So far, the two bands up for investment have raked in a combined $33,000; once they hit a predetermined amount (from £25,000 to £100,000), they'll use it to make and market an album.

Bandstocks founder Andrew Lewis, who also started the record label B-Unique, says artists get more connection with fans using Bandstocks than they would with major labels.

Sounds like everyone wins, right? Maybe. But none of the artists on Sellaband—at two years old, the veteran of this business model—have produced a bona fide star (on YouTube or anywhere else).

Bob Lefsetz, a longtime industry watcher and author of the influential Lefsetz Letter blog, thinks new bands can achieve the same effect without kicking proceeds back to anyone.

"People who are [setting up sites like Bandstocks] are not altruistic," Lefsetz says. "They're all trying to make money for themselves, and that is the flaw. Anyone who has a free webpage at MySpace can raise money."

L.A.-based singer and guitarist Sam Morris, who just independently released his own E.P. at a cost of $30,000, balked at the thought of giving 50 percent of his net receipts away, as he would on Bandstocks (30 percent to investors and 20 percent to the site).

"That's a big chunk of change," Morris says. "Essentially, what you're talking about is doing something on an independent basis that represents what record companies do already. But if you sign with a record company, you could be guaranteed a certain amount of publicity."

One band has already successfully created its own independent business model: Marillion, which solicited enough preorders from fans (12,000 of them) to pay for an album way back in 2001.

Still, in the iTunes era of single-song downloads, will the "crowdsource" model (a system that draws on a large group of volunteers to perform a task that would normally be done by paid employees or a larger, single entity) for financing albums ever attract enough fans to make the model viable for a bigger, mainstream audience?

There are signs of piqued interest, like a $5 million round of financing and partnerships with Amazon and Heineken for Sellaband. And Slicethepie says its users now post 10,000 music reviews per day.

Perhaps the bands (and fans) involved aren't interested in Rihanna-level stardom—just enough to keep the music alive.

Correction: This article originally said that no band had reached their goal of having raised $50,000 using these services. That assertion was based on a review of Sellaband's "top artists" page. The company says 25 bands have "reached their goal" and lists them separately on its website.