- Promotional Discourses
Promoted by numerous players in business, the media, academia, and politics, it is supposedly certain that the crowdfunding model will spread and become a significant component in numerous economic sectors—a determination reflected in the extent of coverage in both print and online media (Benistant and Marty 2016). These discourses are echoed by the publication, in many countries, of dozens of didactic and popular works with evocative titles such as A Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide: Build a Better Business by Building Community (Stegmaier 2015), Crowdfunding Basics in 30 Minutes: How to Use Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Other Crowdfunding Platforms to Support Your Entrepreneurial and Creative Dreams (Epstein 2018); Le Crowdfunding: les rouages du crowdfunding (Crowdfunding: The Mechanics of Crowdfunding) (Iizuka 2015); Le Crowdfunding: mode d’emploi (Crowdfunding: An Instruction Manual) (Hendrickx 2015), and Crowdfunding: mener son projet (Crowdfunding: Running Your Project) (Baudoire 2016). If we are to believe these various infatuated commentators, crowdfunding has become a ‘must’ for the funding of cultural production at an individual, community, industrial, and institutional level.
This enthusiastic discourse can take as evidence the continually improving economic performance of the platforms. In Europe, across 150 platforms including all forms of financing, the amounts raised grew to almost €3 billion in 2014—a growth of 146% on 2012.2 According to the BPI, 80% of the money raised came from UK platforms. After the UK came France, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain. Worldwide, crowdfunding in all its forms grew from \$2.6 billion in 2012 to \$34 billion in 2015, shared unequally across continents, with the majority concentrated in North America, Europe and East Asia (Massolution Crowdfunding Industry Report, Crowdsourcing.org 2015). In France specifically, the professional association Crowdfunding France confirm that, between 2015 and 2016, gifting platforms saw a 37% growth in their activities (from €50.1 million to €68.6 raised), while loan platforms grew by 46% (from €66.3 to €96.6 million raised) and investment platforms by 36% (from €50.3 million to €68.6 million).3 On this basis, crowdfunding is presented as a ‘simple’, rapid response to the timidity of institutional lenders (not to mention cuts to public funding), and as a profitable solution for investors facing poor returns from ‘sovereign’ investments (the Livret A, euro life insurance funds, etc.).
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization