Kickstarter’s mission creep. I had a fascinating conversation last night with a chap from Kickstarter, a site designed to help creative professionals realize projects.
And it’s still doing that, pretty well. But there’s clearly a degree of mission creep at Kickstarter, too — especially with regard to some of the most successful and highest-profile projects on the site. “A project is not open-ended,” says Kickstarter: “Starting a business, for example, does not qualify as a project.” Yet that’s exactly what Matter is doing with Kickstarter. What’s more, Kickstarter can only be used to fund projects “from the creative fields of Art, Comics, Dance, Design, Fashion, Film, Food, Games, Music, Photography, Publishing, Technology, and Theater”. The bar of soap and the iPhone dock are glossy and sophisticated sales pitches: one of the questions yesterday was whether they were closer to SkyMall or to QVC.
Getting a product to market is hard. In either situation, your funders have very little recourse. Microfunding Is The Future of Labels! (...But Kickstarter Is The Wrong Model For Bands) By now we’ve all at least heard about Kickstarter.
Many of us have helped to fund projects. I’ve supported 5 or 6 myself. The best I can discern is that Kickstarter projects follow one of thee models. The explanations are a bit long, but I hope to tie this back into music and into why I believe the Kickstarter models are mostly not the correct models for funding recordings, but are great models for other types of projects. Additionally, if I ran Kickstarter, I’d disallow projects that did not meet a stricter set of guidelines because I believe that many projects that are on the site actually damage the Kickstarter brand and the entire concept of microfunding.
Model 1 - Donation / Support These projects are designed to produce art, ideas, operations, movements, or objects that supporters want the world to have. Supporters may receive a token of contribution - a thank you inscribed on the notion, an attribution of contribution associated with the notion, etc. Model 3 - The pure pre-order. 4 Essential Elements To A Kickstarter Campaign. Recently, I spoke with Yancey Strickler, who is the co-founder of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform for creativity.
In this interview, Strickler talks about moving past a one-size fits all model for financing creativity, how pull marketing models relate to Kickstarter, and why fan-funding encourages fans to become more active particiapants in their cultural lives. Hypebot: In the traditional record industry, a one-size-fits-all paradigm existed. How does crowdfunding disrupt the one-size-fits-all paradigm of financing the production of recorded music?
Being that it's more democratic in nature, does it fund creative works that otherwise wouldn't be produced? Yancey Strickler: Let's step back a little bit first. Artists have always had some reservations about this, but those reservations were largely academic. Audiences could care less. On Kickstarter there's no one to satisfy except your fans. Yancey Strickler: The biggest differences are in who controls the relationship.