The barriers facing artists’ use of crowdfunding platforms: Personality, emotional labor, and going to the well one too many times

Abstract

Popular discourse frames crowdfunding as a way for those traditionally locked out of financing opportunities to leverage the connectivity of the Internet to widen their reach beyond their immediately accessible networks and secure funds for a wide variety of projects. Using a survey of crowdfunding project founders in the culture industries, we explored the relationship between certain social and psychological characteristics and attitudes toward crowdfunding. We examined how extraversion, surface acting, emotional labor, the social composition of project backers, and project success all relate to enjoyment and future intentions of using crowdfunding in the culture industries. Crowdfunding appears to advantage culture producers with particular personality structures while disadvantaging others. In sum, crowdfunding seems beneficial but might be useful only for particular types of artists and therefore should not supplant other traditional financing modes.

Capitalizing on the crowd: The monetary and financial ecologies of crowdfunding

“…For example, roughly half of all crowdfunding campaigns in the UK fail to raise sufficient funding to allow projects to proceed (Nesta 2013b). Successful campaigns have also been shown to require the mobilization of social and cultural capital in ways that have equity and exclusionary effects (Davidson and Poor 2014). Such effects are especially apparent in crowdfunding's financial ecologies.…”

Varieties of cultural crowdfunding

“…artists, market intermediaries, audiences, and consumers. An artist or creator using crowdfunding can test the social response and financial viability of a project outside the traditional cultural production system (Bonet et al, 2016) and, in the process, retain a larger share of income through ownership and control of intellectual property (Kappel, 2009;Davidson and Poor, 2015). Crowdfunding also implies side-lining market intermediaries, like record companies, book and videogame publishers, and film producers, in favour of building a direct relationship between artists and audiences (Thorley, 2012;Swords, 2017).…”

From friendfunding to crowdfunding: Relevance of relationships, social media, and platform activities to crowdfunding performance

“…It is defined as “an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes” (Schwienbacher and Larralde, 2012: 4). An emerging stream of research confirms that crowdfunding can be a new source of value creation (Aitamurto, 2011; Burtch et al, 2014; Davidson and Poor, 2014; Hills, 2015; Lehner, 2013). In this study, we analyze value creation in and beyond a project creators’ social network and examine effects of social media usage (Facebook and Twitter) and the online crowdfunding platform.…”