At this point, we’ve seen tons of stories of “crowdfunding” bands. More get submitted pretty much every day. We’ve seen bands raise a few thousand dollars this way, and we’ve seen bands raise tens of thousands of dollars this way. So it seems a bit bizarre to read the following NY Times’ article by Randall Stross, where he takes a look at a very small number of crowdfunding stories and concludes that bands can’t make money that way.
Fan financing of music seems best suited to exceedingly small projects. While it is cheering to see the success stories at Kickstarter and other sites, it is dismaying to see just how modest are the goals of the most successful.Support that is enough for full-time pursuit of music is still nowhere in sight. Gas money for Austin may turn out to be about good as it gets.
Hmm. Jill Sobule raised over $80,000 in less than two months. That seems like more than gas money. Ellis Paul raised over $100,000. That seems like more than gas money. It’s not clear exactly how much Josh Freese was able to get from his experiment, but it was clearly over $30,000 from reports that were given. Marillion has been surviving on crowdfunding for over a decade.
Sure, plenty of the artists who are using this model are small time and aren’t getting very much. But to claim that it can’t support the full-time pursuit of music is provably false. By the very same methodology used by Stross, you could conclude that selling albums was not enough for the full-time pursuit of music. That’s because most bands who have created albums never made much more than gas money to Austin. But some made millions. And yet, back in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, I’d bet the NY Times wasn’t writing stories claiming that “making an album isn’t enough for full-time pursuit of music.”
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