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Comment by othello | Hacker News Reader

"If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers."

Probably the best quote from the post. Soon the only way of making a living from a creative endeavour might be to be funded by patrons, then releasing your content for free. A generalized Louis CK model if you will.

Funny how that would bring us back to pre-18th century days where patronage was the only business model in town for creative types, with all the constraints that came with artists-patrons relationships.

Except in this world everybody would get to play Medicis or Louis XIV. I certainly hope that "crowd-patronage" will mitigate the limitations of artistic freedom that often came with traditional patronage.

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Isn't 'crowd-patronage' essentially letting the market decide?

It wouldn't require that many fans either -- assuming each fan brought 30 bucks worth of merch and donations, you are looking at a middleclass wage at 2K fans. No matter how obscure your genre is, it ought to be possible to get 2k fans.

I would say it is forcing the market to decide.

When I have to be a patron, I can't just lean back and honor good products by buying them. I have to look up names, sample their past work, invest money in projects that might suck.

I'd do everything that investors are paid for right now. Except I would feel I'm wasting my life away because I'm doing all this over €10, not €10m.

Maybe the future value for labels is to collect a subscription fee from customers and they would do the vetting for you. That's what labels do now but under this system, it'll hopefully avoid that whole fronting bands money in exchange for the bands' life thing.

I actually wrote a couple paragraphs down that road, but it started sounding too Bob Lefsetz, so I scrapped them. I think we're already (back) in the age of the creative/patron model.

As far as the limitations that come with traditional patronage, I'd say the limitations that came with traditional record contracts were probably at least as restrictive since the label was operating under that assumption that this was a business deal at the end of the day, whereas the patron has no expectations for recouping their investment. At least not monetarily.

Programming is following the same model, except it's called a talent acquisition.

I hope Kickstarter eventually does something like this, except with some guarantees on delivery. Like pledges that are only released once the content is delivered.

That doesn't work. Inventors on Kickstarter need that initial money to create their first product. If we say "no money 'til we have the product," then the inventors will have to go somewhere else to get that seed funding. And then we're back to square one.

A two-stage model would seem workable. Stage one would be like Kickstarter as-is: if(speculative funding threshold met), then(inventor/creator gets a payment so they can start work). Stage two would be like a bounty for meeting some further goal(s) (still actively working on it three months later, actually wrote/released the program/art, X number of products shipped in six months, etc).

Right now, selling your product to people (who don't get one for being a backer) functions as stage two. But I don't see why formalizing that process would be detrimental (it would also start providing some metrics on "success" beyond "funding success"). Though the issue of who gets to decide if the goal(s) is(are) met is an obvious point of probable contention which needs resolving (backer votes?, panel of experts at the payment escrow service?).

As a potential backer of something, I might like to know that there is going to be a continuing clear incentive on the table to keep the creator working through inevitable obstacles. That might increase the number of times I open my wallet.

This would be for things like music and film only, with perhaps some of the money raised handed over immediately, and the rest held until the project is complete.

And, since the musician/filmmaker/whatever has already been paid, a further stipulation on receiving the rest of the money could be that it's released under creative commons license, or something like that.

Seems workable to me. (Either way I'm confused about the downvotes.)

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