In a sane and just world, crowdfunding sites such as Indiegogo and FundIt would exist per their original concept: to help creatives, entrepreneurs and start-ups access acutely needed finance for projects.
Crowdfunding sites, created so that fans, followers and supporters could bring a film, album, non-profit or documentary into being by donating money, put the power squarely back into the hands of consumers and creatives. Middlemen, including record labels, film studios, banks and arts bodies are largely relegated to a watching role from the sidelines.
Certainly, some worthy Irish projects have benefited from this people power in the past, among them Garry O'Neill's photography book Where Were You? along with Mary Nally's Drop Everything festival and Róisín Agnew's essay magazine Guts. A meritocratic triumph in each case.
But humanity being as maddening as it is, crowdfunding didn't stay that worthy for long, and it's recently become a different beast. Last month, we reached peak Indiegogo as Tom Packer set up a page to "help Tom to find love".
Ascribing to the theory that it takes 13 dates to find true love, and that a decent date costs £100 (€133.50), Packer attempted to raise £1,300 for his quest.
One of the conditions of crowdfunding is that donors are offered incentives to part with their cash; in this case, a £10 donation will get you a signed photo of Packer himself, while a £1,000 donation gets you a day-trip to Paris with Packer.
No doubt feeling the business end of a brewing media storm, Packer closed his campaign down and received no funds towards his quest for love (and if he has a modicum of sense, he’ll laugh the entire fandango off as a wind-up).
Misunderstanding
A few weeks previously, 26-year-old Gabrielle Wathen raised $573 (€510) after she took a 22-minute taxi to the tune of $367 (thanks to a seasonal price hike). “Not only is it my 26th birthday, it is rent day,” she wrote as part of her GoFundMe campaign. “This misunderstanding has cost me 80 per cent of the funds I have to my name and I spent a good two hours of my birthday crying over it.”
The list of other crowdfunding campaigns runs the gamut: dozens of chancers have petitioned for rent, holidays, breast augmentation surgery, spa trips, or help with personal finance issues.
Many of these personal campaigns have been refashioned, however tenuously, into a cry from the heart: “Nowadays a minority of people can feel rock . . . Let me feel it even more,” pleads one man hoping to buy a guitar. Opportunism plus millennial entitlement make for a rather unseemly combustion, it would seem.
It's not just the millennials at it though, nor for that matter those in need. Despite a reported net worth of $40 million, Spike Lee took to Kickstarter to raise $1.25 million for a pet project. Ditto Zach Braff (net worth $22 million), who wanted to circumvent the supposed oppression of the Hollywood studio system to make his film Wish I Was Here.
When it comes to crowdfunding, a lack of shame in one’s game is a definite plus. But how does this cap-in-hand scenario go over with Irish folk?
Nina Hynes was the very first musician on FundIt to petition for finance to make an album, Goldmine, under the name of her outfit Dancing Suns. At the behest of her friend Laura Sheeran, Hynes raised more than her €10,000 target.
“I still owed a lot of money on the previous record, but I was writing a lot of songs,” recalls Hynes. “When Laura suggested crowdfunding, my first reaction was, ‘Who’d fund me? No one cares if I put out a record.’ I felt really weird and uncomfortable begging for money.”
Overboard
Offering incentives as imaginatively diverse as a cookery video, private recording sessions and a Skype class, Hynes took to social media to petition friends and fans.
“I think I went a bit overboard on the rewards,” she reflects. “And knowing what I do about how much an album costs, I wish I’d asked for more.”
Reaching target, however, was just the beginning of the slog. “Fabien [Leseure – Hynes’ partner and musical collaborator] and I had daytime jobs, then we’d go to the studio. Our daughter would sleep on the couch while we worked all night, then we’d go home and sleep for a few hours.”
Yet having a faction of funders in place provided much-needed impetus for Hynes, both financially and psychologically. She too has noticed the rise in non-creative projects jockeying for elbowroom on crowdfunding sites.
“Personally, I don’t have a problem with people asking for whatever they want on there,” she says.
