Interesting stuff, Kickstarter's most successful artist: www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/26/ama...lmer-future-of-music

Thanks for the link. This is a realistic assessment of crowd-funding. There is no "new model". There will be lots of different models in the future, and (I fear) most will involve the remaining majors in one way or another.

In as much as she's not indebted to a major it's a new model. Depending on what was offered to the investors the chances are she's not indebted to them either so it's very different to the 'old' model.

Personally I think it stinks. Saying she will use 1/4 of it to pay off her debts and then pocket 100k is just criminal, nobody has backed her for that, they want to finance her album/tour etc. to see her do well.

From reading comments on recent piracy discussions it's quite apparent that the general public hate the music industry AKA the majors and IMO people like this are going to make them hate the individual artists too.

Very sad.

Not sure about that K. Don't forget that the investors are getting something back
such as her album and tour and she is only living on $100k which is reasonable.
Crowdfunding is good but I think it's flawed as a model. A variant from it is the pre-order model.
Having said that a good friend of mine raised over $10k using crowd funding to fund a single.

Yes, this is a variation of the decades old pre-order-model. Which is a big improvement over Sellaband and similar schemes which promised the "believers" / "investors" profit participation etc.

Another good article about Kickstarter can be found here:
Kickstarter Will Not Save Artists From the Entertainment Industry’s Shackles