The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter http://tinyurl.com/3emfl46
The question of how to fund our various independent projects is a constant question in an era of democratized production. I’ve already written (and done a Terence and Philip Show about) branded media, because I believe that will be an important part of the funding future. But at the grassroots level, fan funding has proved successful for many artists, and in the case of Kickstarter, for projects other than music and video based.
So what kind of “creative projects†does Kickstarter enable? Well, a couple of artists raised $2,181 to send funny handwritten letters to every household in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood; someone pulled in $8,441 to help finance the creation of “a searchable ethnographic databasebuilt from the lyrics of over 40,000 hip-hop songsâ€; a couple of people got $30,030 to publish a version of “Huckleberry Finn†that replaces Mark Twain’s use of a notorious racial epithet with the word “robot.†At times the sums have been a good bit larger: $67,436 to build a statue of Robocopin Detroit; $161,744 to make a computer-animated adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story; and nearly $1 million in pledges to finance a band to wear iPod Nanos as wristwatches.
It’s a long article but if you care about fan funding, it’s well worth the read.