Acknowledging Privilege for Classical Arts

This year I gave my fifth annual talk at the Fresh Inc. Festival for young musicians. I love helping artists. As usual, I spoke about the role of crowdfunding in the life of a young musician. But I tried to take classical music’s privilege a bit more seriously this year, and to address the differences …

2016 Fresh Inc talk on crowdfunding

This week I gave my fourth annual half-hour talk on crowdfunding to the Fresh Inc Festival, run by Melissa Snoza and the Fifth House Ensemble in Chicago. After all these years Melissa and I have still never been in the same place; one day we’ll have to fix that. I like to post something about …

YouTube launches Crowdfunding as a feature

It was only a matter of time. It used to be that social networking was a specialized feature that was only done by specialized websites. Then social became a must-have feature for everyone. That’s what’s happening now to crowdfunding. YouTube is adding a tip feature to its channel, announced in this blog post: Fan Funding: …

Fresh Inc 2014

Last week I returned to the Fresh Inc Festival to speak about arts entrepreneurship (and specifically crowdfunding) to a group of young composers and performers. I was a little worried about doing the same talk over again, but as I began preparing my notes for the talk, I realized that wasn’t going to be a …

NAMPC post-game

The National Arts Marketing Project conference was a blast. There were lots of smart people, the conference was very well organized, and I was upside down (photo credit: @lynnekingsley). It rocked. I spoke with Sara Eileen Hames and Casey Middaugh about how arts organizations can use Kickstarter to rapidly prototype programming ideas while engaging communities. …

Arts, meet Capital. Then meet crowdfunding.

I’m thinking a lot about how artists and small organizations are similarly structurally cash-poor (we try hard to make art, not save or earn money), and about the boundary in the arts between the structurally cash-poor actors and the structurally cash-rich ones: foundations, governments, Big Content(tm), corporate donors, and individual wealthy people. I got started …

Learn Kickstarter from AFP’s new campaign

Because really, there’s only so long you can go on a blog about the future of the arts and the internet without blogging about Amanda Palmer. That’s her new Kickstarter video down there. Back it. Buy it. Love it. But more to the point: THAT’S HOW YOU DO THAT. I spend a lot of time …