Reply To: What makes you fund a kickstarter?
I agree that I had trouble figuring out a decent summary or even which links to give out when promoting Marian’s kickstarter, but the thing she’s funding is itself complicated, and I guess this helps make sure she uses the funding to go where her fans are. In real life it is easier to get to a country if you’re already in one nearby or if you have people on the ground that can help you find places and things, so the business with changing coin-values of countries, enlisting etc. makes sense, even if it’s difficult to summarise. I expect it will get more fun once some countries are unlocked. The video actually explains things pretty well and also gives a sample of the music, so I might just point people to that.
So, let me see… so far, if I haven’t forgotten anything, I’ve donated to four music-related kickstarters (two albums, a European tour and a concert rig) and two other album releases done through other platforms. I fund albums if I know and like the artists, and I fund them more if there are things I like at higher donation levels. That’s about it. If it’s someone I’m a casual fan of but don’t have all the music of yet, I’m likely to go for the funding level that gets me all the music they’ve ever made and maybe some other small thing just so it’ll be more fun than simply buying their music. If it’s an artist I’m already a huge fan of, and I already have all their music, I am of course even more motivated to fund them, but there’s not as much in it for me in terms of music, so I’ll look for other exclusive bits and pieces (Things I have personally received from such things include T-shirts, stickers, posters, tour postcards, handwritten lyrics, bloopers from a music video, rare CDs, karaoke tracks that are otherwise unavailable, etc.) at higher levels. So if you want people to donate a lot, it’s probably good to have both music rewards and other stuff. I usually already know I want to donate and roughly how much before I get around to watching the video (if there is one.)
As for getting people to donate at all; I don’t know. If I’d really never heard of an artist before, or just heard of them in passing, and several of my friends were backing them, then I’d watch the video and listen out for amazing music in that video. If the video had really great music, I might think of donating at the entire-discography level, though I usually don’t buy entire discographies until I’m familiar with one album, so maybe I’d go for just the (digital) album plus maybe some small kickstarter-exclusive thing just because I can. The album I’ve backed with the least knowledge (but still nonzero) of the artist was Amanda Palmer’s, and I think I just got the album and nothing else from that.