
The scene takes place in the living room of an h? Such luxury, rue des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The admission staff, it’s been ages as velvet chairs has not received much buttocks or amortized as many decibels. Gradually covering the “clink” cuts and flute your, Holden takes instruments arranged in the lounge. In this Dec. 3, 2012, the trio played, in order, and for the first time in public, the songs from her new album, daze. “I hope you like it, but if this is not the case, it will not prevent the disk to arrive in your bo? Your mailbox!” Warns the singer, Armelle Pioline.
The hundred spectators smiled. If there is that they have all through the website KissKissBankBank.com, helped finance daze. In total, 15,000 euros were collected. “We would have released the album no matter what, but this money has allowed us to save in good condition, pay all our employees, press – for the first time in our career – vinyls, to use at a press …, “said Armelle.
This rout h? Telier is one of the many privileges Holden has reserved its 163 contributors. Some offered only 5 euros, others went up to 2000. In return, according to the amount of their donations, they re? U lots ranging from a collector version of daze in a case of high-Medoc “Chateau Holden”, along with a painting of the album cover and even for the most profligate, a trio concert apartment.
Before embarking on the adventure of Armelle? overcome the reluctance of Mocke, guitarist: “He felt that it was like the handle!” Stunning is the fifth album of the band since its formation in 1998. This is the first that produces and distributes its own, away from the music industry. A CD version, drawn in 3000 copies, will join record stores on March 1st. “Without this fundraiser, we would probably indebted to remove the disk, said Armelle. Several musician friends as JP Nataf and Jean-Louis Murat, congratulated us for our courage. Some even reluctant to take the plunge. For my , I know I’ll start. ”
Exponential Growth
In fact, the crowdfunding (literally, “crowd funding”) recorded an exponential growth since the first dedicated sites have emerged in 2007. According to a study published in May 2012 by Crowdsourcing.org, nearly $ 1.5 billion (? 1.12 billion) was raised in 2011 on the 450 platforms in service around the world, including more 837 million in North America. The total funds raised has created? 72% in 2011, according to forecasts Crowdsourcing.org, rising be around the 91% in 2012. As for the Frenchman, nearly 37% of them, according to the 2013 book of the CSA institute studies, they are “ready” to invest in a site like this.
If the crowdfunding today irrigates areas as diverse as health, environment, journalism, science or humanitarian, culture continues to play in the matter, a leading r – like ‘illustrated in May 2012, the pot collected by the American rocker Amanda Palmer: $ 1.2 million in just thirty days, record to beat.
Frayed at the turn of the 2000s, the crisis of the disc and the rise of mass downloading, the music industry was one of the first to demonstrate that, on the Web, mingle bags nodes and good strings, in other words, the Internet is both the problem than the solution. In 2004, the Frenchman Louis Philippe, tired of scrapping against bloodless labels, did not hesitate to draw upon his fans via his website, to produce and distribute his tenth album, The Wonder of It All.
Barrage of criticism
Three years later, the first crowdfunding site hexagonal, MyMajorCompany.com, opened shop. To date, forty musicians have reached the required by the EU label gauge – 4000 ? 200 000 depending on the project – to remove a disc. Despite the undeniable success, if not aesthetic, at least commercial (Gregory, Joyce Jonathan, Irma) MyMajorCompany towel these days a barrage of criticism.
In October 2012, the National Union of Phonographic Publishing (SNEP) was excluded from the Top 50 album Baptiste Giabiconi, under the pretext that it was sold almost exclusively on discount sale-priv??e.com site. The soup union? Onnait including marketing teams MyMajorCompany operate massive purchases of CD to raise the buzz. “We did not buy any disc Baptist contends Micha? The Goldman (son of Jean-Jacques), the founder of MyMajorCoompany. I open the accounts of the company that wants to check it. Reality, c is that sale-Priv??e.com and the music industry at war. It became their battlefield … the Parc des Princes one night PSG-OM is was. ”
Their heart tee, nearly a thousand “co angry” met on a website and a Facebook group. They brocardent jumble opacity MyMajorCompany expenses incurred by the repeated postponement of several record releases and too low returns on investment per? Us by subscribers, some up to compare the financial package to each ? do Ponzi.
“There are plenty of things that did not work, recognize? T Micha? L Goldman, which issued a right of reply on the site of Point. Some co, minority, were very disappointed us not to live the human adventure they had hoped. They felt invest between EUR 100 000 over an artist via MyMajorCompany and invest 10,000 euros from the same artist with their friends, the media and business income would have been about the same. They are partly right. However, failures have never been the result of a dishonest or malevolent organization on our part. Duty inventory, we do it willingly because it is like? has the crowdfunding grow . But we must stop caricaturing our balance sheet MyMajorCompany, these are extraordinary success, creating a model of great and virtuous funding for creative industries, no trials in five years of existence … ”
Do it yourself and peer-to-peer
“MyMajorCompany merely reproduce, on the Web, the operation of the conventional industry, where its current difficulties, we strive to hack the system, not duplicate, analysis Vincent Ricordeau for its part, the KissKissBankBank boss. When was launched in March 2010, our models were not Universal, but the diy punk and peer-to-peer early hackers. This is not to bet ? like the casino, the success of an artist, and hope hypothetical returns on investment, but to be the creation na In our counterparties are symbolic donations or in kind, not financial.; users are not co-producers, but co-creators. As artists, they are owners of 100% of the publishing rights, which is not always the case with our competitors. ”
To date, KissKissBankBank, which employs six employees, boasts 3 million raised since its inception. Like most platforms, the company is financed through a commission, ie 8% of each collection completed. To grow, it relies on partnerships, such as those recently established with La Banque Postale, Capa or MK2, but especially on diversification: an English branch has been created, and music coexist here with a dozen other disciplines from photography to the performing arts.
Same story of heart tee competition. In two years of existence, has already Ulule.com funding projects in 1550, without discipline or aesthetic barriers: “We accept all types of projects, says Mathieu Mayor Poset, director of communication projects and our website r.? it is to help each creative potential to meet the community, without judgment on the artistic quality of the project. Ulule.com on, projects that would have existed no matter what, with or without crowdfunding, are a minority. ”
MyMajorCompany that displays 13.3 million euros raised since 2007, put it also, now, the all-round development. These days, the site encouraged visitors to co carte blanche comedian Fran ois Morel in the theater of the nursery, or to co-finance the restoration of the Pantheon – the subscribers receiving in return for mentioning their name to the entrance of the Parisian monument.
The cinema is not left
Despite the sophistication and severity of its budgets, the French cinema? Ais is no exception. At the recent controversy over its funding system, few to have brandished map crowdfunding. But platforms like PeopleForCinema.com or TousCoProd.com contribute for several years, production and distribution of short and feature films.
Certainly, it is far garnered investments overseas, where the culture of philanthropy is as perennial as is, with us, the public subsidy. According to the November 2012 Cahiers du Cinema, “10% of the films shown at the Sundance Film Festival” last year raised funds on KickStarter.com, the leading U.S. platform. The monthly average amounts referred to 6000 dollars, and cites the example of promising feature films Matt Porterfield (Putty Hill), Marie Losier (The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jane) or Adam Leon (Gimme the Loot).
If the “indie” are the primary users of this system, Hollywood also began to take the game Erotic Thrillers (The Canyons, Paul Schrader, from a screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis), animation (Anomalisa of Charlie Kaufman) or musicals (Gold Help the Girl, Stuart Murdoch, the singer of Belle & Sebastian), the amounts so blithely exceed 000,100 dollars, reaching 441 thousand dollars for The Goon, an animated co by David Fincher.
Nothing as yet in Europe, but investments collected on PeopleForCinema.com allowed Poliss, Ma? Ween or Habemus Papam, Nanni Moretti, to complete their financing plans. To balance the budget in his documentary The Golden Sleep, released in September 2012 in three copies, the young filmmaker and producer Davy Chou raised 10,000 euros on TousCoProd.com: “With this money, we could fill the gap left by using the post of the Ile-de-France, on which we had and finally got away. ”
Mouth-to-mouth
But crowdfunding is not just an accumulation of euros or dollars. Gone from being a spectator to actor integral part of the project, each subscriber becomes a press momentum. “This aspect of crowdfunding is a bit overstated, but it is true that our campaign TousCoProd.com generated positive word-of-mouth around the golden Sleep on social networks. This can be played at output, albeit modestly. ”
This is the uniqueness of crowdfunding: each project, its business model and its communication strategy. The amounts are set in advance, the deadline for the collection too. On average, two campaign fails to raise funds within the allotted time. From this follows one of the main criticisms leveled at these sites: they tend to favor projects well “inlaid”. Big names already enjoying a solid fan base, movies “big issues” and “pitches touts” musicians marrying public expectations and the time would be easier acclaimed as, say, the creation of radical demiurges solitary and ascetic. According to this analysis, the crowdfunding accelerate the transition from a supply to a demand economy: once constraints anticipate the needs of the consumer, and thus innovation, cultural industries would seek more than satisfy .
“Third Industrial Revolution”
Nay, replicate crowdfunding supporters, led by the American economist Jeremy Rifkin. For them, the digital age is a phase of creative destruction, fostering the emergence of a “third industrial revolution” based on sharing and circularity. At the age of the property, materialistic, succeeds the age of access, collaborative, Homo economicus, utilitarian and rational gives way to Homo empathicus, altruistic and connected. Breaking the intermediaries between the artist and his public, crowdfunding would, in the words of Rifkin, one of the symptoms of this “empathetic impulse” accelerating “our transformation into fully formed human.”
Rue des Beaux-Arts, spectators rush to the exit of Holden concert. Among them, the singer Wilfried *, who dream to be financed by the crowd his upcoming tour, has a keen look at this way of barter 2.0 “Crowdfunding is based on a simple idea that good: the public gives credit to the artist, in a financial sense, but also moral of the term. ” It is the merit of this innovative financing method, in short, that remind us of some basics: the economy is primarily a matter, not of growth, but of belief.