The Rise of Fanvestors: A study of a crowdfunding community
Date completed: 30 July 2016
This paper was mostly in the music/independent record making fandom where people used a crowdfunding platform called MegaTotal to support musicians and artists directly, sometimes getting a share of the profits when the label was successfully released.
Notable parts from the paper:
“the unstable nature of today’s entertainment industries, in conjunction with the mergence of the social networking sites, creates new phenomena that call for attention on the part of researchers... Crowdfunding can be defined as ‘the act of informally generating and distributing funds, usually online, by groups of people for specific social, personal, entertainment or other purposes”
“crowdfunding is a viable alternative for artists who are interested in financing their works but do not have the necessary resources or proposals from record labels, publishers, or other institutions... this new business model... could show how the relationship between project initiators and contributors is shaped and how the legal system affects the effectiveness of crowdfunding.”
“Fans’ creative expression adds new contexts to the act of consumption, transforming it into production, which results in the circulation of fan-written texts, fan-made movies and recordings, etc.”
“Three types of productivity by fans: semiotic, enunciative, and textual productivity”
“Crowdfunding is a very special case of the social networking phenomenon. It combines the advantages of Web 2.0 with the dynamism of fan communities”
“We’d like to propose they be called ‘fanvestors’ - a portmanteau formed by contracting ‘fan’ with ‘investor’... where their reasons surpass a purely financial context and contribute more meaningfully to a cultural domain”
