These statements are not mutually exclusive. These are our current attitudes towards crowdfunding, which is understandable whenever there’s a paradigm shifting force in any industry. The new way will always have positives and negatives in comparison to the old.

The thing is, our current attitudes don’t matter for two reasons:

1.) No amount of hand-wringing or evangelism will stop the inevitable. The fact of the matter is, records just don’t sell anymore. The internet is a copy machine, and that genie is just not going back into the lamp. The internet is a force of nature much larger than any single human being or law or government can control. As an artist, you can complain about the unfairness of this cruel universe — OR you can get busy figuring out what really sells on the internet, instead of what sells in spite of it.

The good news is, crowdfunding is revealing the kinds of “patronage products” that really do sell online. And how to sell it. It’s the first draft of the upcoming patronage model, and so far it’s looking much fairer to artists and their fans alike.

2.) The current incarnation of crowd funding as fundraiser is just the first incarnation of a much larger shift towards a direct-to-fan model. Too much of the conversation around “crowd funding as future of music” is centered around this idea of “asking for money,” or fundraising. The “asking for money” element is invoked because it is effective in conjuring the emotionally direct relationship required in the new patronage economy. It’s a great marketing angle, a sugar-coating to the pill that is direct-to-fan sales.

However, if you look under the hood, crowd funding is more about “selling” than it is about “asking for money.” The fact of the matter is, most “pledges” are closed based on the appeal of a “reward.” Just because we’re using words like “pledges” and “rewards” doesn’t make this transaction a good ‘ol capitalist exchange of value. In fact, if you compare campaigns that overachieve to those that underachieve and control for click-throughs, the biggest variable is almost always the quality or value of the “rewards.” In fact, I’ve known more than a few campaigns that actually lost money because they priced their “rewards” too low to make any kind of margin.

I’ve run quite a few successful music campaigns myself. In any given campaign, I could count on onehand the donations we received in it’s purest form, sans reward. These “donation” never amounted to more than half a percent of total funds raised. Oh, and by the way, the IRS taxes this revenue as a sale, and not as a tex-exempt charitable donation. Even corporations get bigger handouts than what artists are getting through crowdfunding, that’s just a fact.

Sort of a moot point, because some of the most enterprising artists are already moving towards a straight up patronage model, without the pretense of “fund-raising.” It’s not up anymore, but Run The Jewels ran a pre-album sale, selling things like experiences, memorabilia, and most infamously, a remix of the entire album made entirely with cat sounds called “Meow the Jewels.” These “patronage products” are usually associated with a crowdfunding campaign, and many people mistakenly labeled it so. Nope. They sold these items in a regular ‘ol commerce Shopify shop. They didn’t have a deadline or public goal. It was a straight up capitalistic value exchange. And that is where the industry is inevitably going. We’ll soon forget that “asking for money” was ever part of the process when the new patronage model matures into the norm.