Crowdfunding seems to have taken the music industry by storm. Artists, Directors, and just about everyone else has been able to have their respective fan bases raise money to promote their upcoming projects. With todays way of starting promo and gaining a quality audience, crowdfunding seems to have been in a big tug of war for financial promotion.
”
It’s In Bad Taste, Like Panhandling!
When people attack crowdfunding with name calling, it usually reveals their misunderstanding of crowdfunding. Calling it panhandling or handouts is an attempt to give crowdfunding an air of randomness and illegitimacy.
But pledge/reward-style crowdfunding as practiced on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and PledgeMusic by musicians, is an odd hybrid of presale and patronage that is based on the voluntary participation of individual supporters who typically receive a reward for their pledge. That seems neither random nor illegitimate.
How Can You Ask Your Fans to Pay For the Process?
A corollary to this concern might be an objection to the self-publishing aspects of crowdfunding but that’s more an issue in literary circles than in music. However both tend to focus on the idea that only certain sources of money are appropriate as funding sources.
But crowdfunding’s disruption is that of unleashing the crowd, the audience, one’s army of fans, and allowing them to fund what they wish to receive rather than waiting to buy what they’re eventually offered. It’s a powerful concept that strongly differs from the idea that only those with plenty of money should be able to decide what’s available to fans.
But There Are No Guarantees With Crowdfunding!
It’s true that crowdfunding platforms don’t offer refunds, they simply facilitate transactions, and it’s true that some people will take advantage of those platforms to defraud funders. To some degree that’s simply natural. Put humans and money together and such things happen.
Though it’s true that bands have been funded and couldn’t complete projects, most of the big failures have come from gadgets that were incredibly overfunded and yet not really ready for producton or that miscalculated the costs of production.
Music campaigns tend to be based on the musician as brand, recieving support based on their actual networks from friends to fans. So music campaigns tend to be backed by the desire of the musician to follow through with a successful outcome. Not a sure thing but certainly far from a landscape randomly littered with grifters.”
For more of this story, click here.
