I really like Molly Crabapple’s essay about the power of crowd-funding for art, and her use of Kickstarter in specific as a means for gathering support for artistic projects. Other successes like the Order of the Stick Kickstarter ($1.25 million) and the DoubleFine Kickstarter ($3.3 million) show the sheer quantity of financial support that’s available–for artists at the top of their game, with a broad network of folks who care about their success.
I don’t know how well this model would work for people just starting out, but maybe it doesn’t matter. A Kickstarter campaign is sort of like a promise: “Give me money and I’ll do something awesome.” It’s easier to believe that promise when it’s made by an artist who has already done awesome things (even if they’re of limited scope).
On a different tangent: since this is all crowd-funding in the cloud, are we living in the crowd-cloud now? Or are we part of the cloud-crowd? Or something in between–Clrowd?