Crowdfunding Your Dream
By Peter Lloyd“We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Shakespeare. And even in his day, Bill surely understood that dreams are made on money. But then there are artists, inventors, innovators, and other creative people who dream but often lack money. Is there hope for them and their dreams?
What artist, inventor, or innovator would not have envied Peter Illych Tchaikovsky. He was able to compose full-time for 13 years, because his patron, Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, funded him. Under one condition—they must never meet. Fair enough! If you want to know what Peter thought of Nadezhda, listen to his Symphony No. 4. He dedicated it to her.Although we don't think of patronage these days the way it occurred in medieval and Renaissance Europe, feudal Japan, other Southeast Asian kingdoms, and elsewhere, it happens. And today we have the Internet and crowdfunding to help us put creative people and people with money together.
Crowdfunding not only works, it can work more quickly and efficiently than the traditional grant-application process or scouring uptown for rich patrons like Nadezhda.
Sites like prosper.com circumvent traditional bank-based lending by putting those who need money directly in touch with people who have money to invest. Rocket Hub allows anyone searching for support to pitch for funding.
How appropriate that the name of Tchaikovsky's patron, Nadezhda, means "hope" in Russian. She also gave hope to Claude Debussy and Nikolai Rubinstein. Now there's hope for just about anybody with a dream and an Internet connection. And you don't even have to ever meet your funder.
See also:
- The Crowdfunding Wiki
- Paying for Music in the Internet Age by Rick Karr, NPR
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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