By now, we’ve all heard much about Amanda Palmer’s remarkable crowdfunding success. Her $1.2 million Kickstarter campaign showed everyone that the masses do, in fact, still support music-and pay for it.
As much as I love crowdfunding, the amount of press Ms. Palmer received got me wondering when and if there may come a time when the system may be corrupted. As it stands now, artists sign up with whichever crowndfunding site they feel best suits their needs, fans donate money in various amounts and get ‘thank you’ rewards depending on the amount donated. The die hard music fan in me LOVES this. I love the sense of community it brings. I love artists and fans working together to bring new music into the world. I love fans feeling appreciated by the artists whom they adore and feeling as though they’ve played a role even more significant than buying a t-shirt or concert ticket.
There is a tiny part of me that wonders, however, if at some point, some multi-jillion dollar marketing firm will use its budget to make a bunch of ‘donations’ to create a buzz about an artist they’re trying to promote. Maybe a label will have all of its interns make donations and use money they planned to spend promoting ‘insert name of next big thing here‘.
In the months since her Kickstarter campaign, Amanda Palmer has become a virtual household name, and for all the right reasons. She is a talented artist who used innovation and social media for the betterment of her career. What she’s accomplished could not have been attained by any traditional means; that is to say, had she simply released an album the old fashioned way, my mother still wouldn’t know Amanda Palmer’s name, and, talented though she may be, Ms. Palmer would not have gotten $1.2 million.
All of that is moot, however. She will now be the standard to which all wildly successful crowdfunding campaigns are compared. Naïve as it may be, I find there to be a certain purity about crowdfunding. I truly hope that it remains that way and doesn’t become a sort of Payola for the digital era. There are so many artists who deserve attention, not to mention money. Hopefully the greed that tends to overtake the ‘business’ part of the music industry will keep away from crowdfunding and allow it to bridge in the artist-fan relationship.
I must admit, I hadn’t thought of the use of crowdfunding campaigns becoming a problem. But it is true that people take advantage of the things that are pure and they lose the essence of what they were created to be. It’s sad that things are becoming more difficult for independent artists to be able to properly use tools that could help us along in our careers. Great article, Christine!
HI ISH~ thanks so much for stopping by! I hope all is going well with your upcoming album release (you mentioned it in the comments of an article I wrote for Think Like a Label).
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I hope that crowdfunding remains an artist fan thing. I keep getting emails from people stating that they hadn’t thought about it being distorted. This means one of two things; either I’ve given a lot of people and idea which I abhor OR I have a fairly low opinion of label/marketing people. It may be a little bit of both.
Let’s be honest, there was money behind this campaign already. Amanda Palmer had already been doing her thing way before this crowdfunding boom. It’s not like a new artist that nobody knows and without a marketing budget is going to raise a million dollars. My opinion is that we shouldn’t be blinding new artists’ eyes thinking that from nothing they’re gonna get to stardom just because they set up a kickstarter account. It’s ridiculous! Love ur blog btw!
Irene~ Good point, she was very established, to say the least. As you said, it would be a very bad thing if absolutely unheard of artists with no background took a story such as this and thought they could realistically replicate that level of success (though I’d love it if they did!)
The thing is though, I fear that everyone who launches a campaign from this point on will always have the Amanda Palmer story in the back of their head someplace. I hope that won’t taint the success that others find with crowdfunding and they can appreciate the money they raise, even if it isn’t a million dollars.
Thank you SO much for reading!
I wonder when an artist will raise a couple of million dollars through crowdfunding and then record their album on the cheap and bank the rest as a retirement fund. Or has this already happened?
It very well may have, or may in the future. I also wonder if it will ever occur that money is raised and the project falls through. I don’t know enough about the specifics to know if money needs to returned to prevent fraud so artists (or those pretending to be) can’t begin a project to raise money and take off with people’s donations, never following through with the project for which the funds were given.