Asking people to invest in an album – or indeed any product – before it’s even recorded is a risky proposition. In fact, as Singapore-based jazz saxophonist Greg Lyons (right) put it, it’s downright “risque”.

In the past two years, however, this funding approach has become far less outlandish, with the likes of Jill Sobule and Marillion successfully leveraging fan interest without so much as walking near a record label.

That’s why Lyons decided the time was ripe for him to try that route too. He’s asked fans to help him raise a budget of US$20,000 to record and distribute a new full album, and while he doesn’t have an album title yet, he’s christened the project LyonShare, which is far more catchy than Sobule’s comparatively banal Jill’s Next Record.

The Singaporean permanent resident’s been in South-east Asia for over one-and-a-half decades, and has been based out of Singapore for the last two years, but he’s received a curious lack of media attention, even though he has regular gigs (with his quartet and 10-piece outfit Omniform) at Blu Jaz Cafe in Singapore’s Bali Lane.

Maybe it’s because he doesn’t fulfill the typical prerequisites for easy marketability – slickness, beauty and glorious youth – but that shouldn’t be a huge limiting factor, especially when you consider that another high-profile jazz man in Singapore, Jeremy Monteiro, also isn’t slick, beautiful or young, but has managed to maintain a decently high media profile.

I ran a large story about Lyons in my day job as a Business Times journalist, which will hopefully help Lyons receive a little more mindshare.

The problem, of course, is that this kind of fund-raising drive requires publicity of both the billboard (flashy mainstream media exposure) and viral (social networking and microblogging) kind to be successful.

Folk-rocker Sobule got media coverage from media giant CNN two months after she started her funding drive in January last year, and upon the completion of her album, California Years, CNN ran another big follow-up article. With a public relations boost like that, it’s no wonder Sobule managed to raise US$88,969, with her original target of US$75,000 reached in less than two months.

Progressive rock band Marillion raised many times that amount in their various fund-raising drives over the years.

Fans in Singapore don’t seem to be quite so ready to part with their money for what could conceivably turn into vaporware. Sure, there’s the unavoidable fact that the population here is under 5 million souls, but for those who like to brandish statistics like that, take a look at chart below breaking down contributions to Jill Sobule’s California Years by country:

You will notice there’s only one contribution each from Singapore and Hong Kong – both at the bare-minimum level. The one from Singapore doesn’t even count because that was me, which means, of course, that none of my fellow Singaporeans was interested.

Luckily, Lyons has gotten more than US$10, though that’s probably because he’s wisely decided to leverage social networking site Facebook and his own website to reach out to his global fanbase. He’s just below the halfway mark to his US$20,000 target. That’s decent, but a big chunk of that came from the sales of two sponsored P.Mauriat saxophones, and there’s only two more months to go before Lyon’s scheduled recording dates in July.

Lyons has actually recorded a fair bit of material in the past, but the only one still available is Island To Island from online vendors like CD Baby and eMusic. That’s because it’s the only album he owns all the rights to and was fairly happy with. Everything else was either deemed substandard (by himself) or left to fall out of production by record labels. There was even an album project in Malaysia that had to be aborted when funds dried up.

So, here he is, 51, with a string of records behind him but only one still available, and none of which truly represent him musically. I think you can imagine how hungry he is to get it right this time round, which is why he decided to book a professional recording studio in London and plan to master the album in New York. In this day and age, anyone can record an album on a computer, but there’s no substitute for an engineer’s ears, acoustics and the right microphones.

Let’s be honest here too – US$20,000 isn’t a lot of money to ask for to record a full album. And it’s not going to fund beer. It’s about getting the best recording setup, which will translate directly into a superior finished product.

Rather than go for an elaborately tiered contribution system like Sobule’s, Lyons has decided to keep it real simple. He’s asking for a flat US$15 (or S$23 for locals), which gets you a full package comprising CD, lead sheets for every song, a personalised dedication, regular fly-on-the-wall updates on the recording/production process, and shipping anywhere in the world. That’s far from shabby.

He hasn’t decided on his digital distribution channels yet, but if he doesn’t host the album as a digital download directly from his website, hopefully he partners with an indie online music store that offers audiophile-quality FLAC lossless downloads, such as Magnatune, Music Is Here and Bleep. Jazz, like classical music, benefits greatly from higher quality digital files, and since Lyons is obviously putting a lot of effort into this project, he might as well do it right.