Page 105 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014This was a competition to create trailers or teasers for films that never existed (or perhaps they did, who knows?...). The proposition was as follows: “A trailer is the best summary of a film, so if you have no budget to make the entire movie, but you do have a well formed idea, go right ahead and make the trailer to show the most brilliant moments”.There are countless examples, but the social networks are an ideal medium for creation, contribution and participation, which fit in with the more open and social nature of the arts in the 21st century.THE NETWORKS AS SUPPORT FOR THE FUNDING OF CULTUREAt a time of financial cut‐backs, with a reduction of public and private sources of funding such as grants or sponsorship, it is the moment to look around for alternative ways to fund culture.Crowdfunding, or microsponsorship, is an approach that has been well tried in other areas such as NGOs and by entrepreneurs. There are at least five types, in terms of what the user who contributes obtains in return. The most widespread in cultural projects is microdonation, in which the user receives recognition, without financial compensation, but with the moral compensation of having helped to make it possible to carry out a worthwhile project that could otherwise not have been implemented.In Spain we have examples such as the film El cosmonauta, the first to be funded in this way. Those who donated more than two euros were credited onscreen. In Latin America this method was used to fund the documentary La educación prohibida. The antecedent of all this took place in 1989, when a rock group, Extremoduro, inspired by the slips of paper children often sell to fund their end‐of‐term trips, started to sell a record before it existed, by means of 1,000 peseta “shares”, in order to obtain the money needed to record it. They managed toAC/Ecollect 250,000 pesetas and they did it: Tú en tu casa, nosotros en la hoguera, the first “transgressive rock” recording. The donors were credited by name on the record sleeve.Going further back, and still in relation to music, we can cite an earlier type of crowdfunding, “subscription concerts”, which in the eighteenth century made possible the appearance of the first independent artists, such as Mozart and Beethoven. This way for the music‐lovers to provide the impetus enabled a renewal to take place in music, which before had been straitjacketed by the need to please powerful people for whom musicians were just another sort of servant.It is well known how in the 19th century when France gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States in 1884, there was no base for it to stand on. So while the ship was on its way to New York with the statue, the Pulitzer newspaper The World started a crowdfunding campaign, by public subscription, that raised more than 100,000 dollars in five months, in 160,000 donations of less than one dollar. The social networks of the day were moved by the new medium, the most powerful information service of the time.This collective economy, which has incorporated terms such as crowdfunding and crowdlending, which now has a prime exponent in a microfunding network which is aimed at large‐scale support for creative projects: this is Kickstarter. Founded in 2009, just two and a half years later it had already raised 200 million dollars for 23,000 creative projects. Over the same period, the budget of the US federal fund for the funding of the arts, the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), was 145 million dollars. So far since the launch of Kickstarter it has raised 750 million dollars and has funded 47,000 projects with contributions from 4.6 million private patrons.Kickstarter was founded as a company, not as a non‐ profit organisation. Not all the initiatives attract the interest of donors and obtain funding, only 48% of them. It really acts as a true market in which it is necessary to convince microfinancers that theWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 8: ARE THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ANY USE TO THE CULTURE INDUSTRY? CURRENT PAGE...105