Crowdfunding in the Culture Sector: Adoption, Effects and Implications (CROWDCUL)

Prosjektsamandrag

The culture sector experiences a number of challenges such as cuts in public funding and increased competition for donors and sponsors. At the same time, increasing digitalisation and emergence of alternative pathways circumventing traditional intermediaries brings new opportunities for self-production and self-release of artistic content.

Crowdfunding - obtaining funding from large audiences, in which each backer provides a relatively small amount, instead of raising large sums from a small number of large investors and backers - represents a promising development in this regard by suggesting a new model for realizing a broad spectre of cultural productions.

Despite its growing popularity, research dedicated to the role and impact of crowdfunding on stakeholders in the culture sector remains limited. This is surprising as crowdfunding may have critical influence on the balance between the commercial and non-commercial, the popular and the alternative artistic expression, aesthetic practices both online and offline, as well as the very structure of cultural funding.

To address this gap, the current project seeks to explore three important themes currently either completely or largely absent from the existing literature. Instead of focusing on the success factors of crowdfunding campaigns mainly addressed in the previous literature, we shift the attention to fundamental questions about processes before and after crowdfunding practice.

To do so, we focus on the following: identification of the factors influencing adoption of crowdfunding by artists (pre-campaign), the short- and long-term impacts of successful crowdfunding experience (post-campaign), and their implications at a sector level for aesthetic practices and traditional funders of cultural productions. This novel research agenda will be studied in Norway and can serve as a basis for replication studies in other national contexts with different traditions and institutional environments in the culture sector.