More than raising money: the role of crowdfunding in the development of cultural projects

Driven by worldwide digitalization alongside the culture sector’s lifelong challenges of getting funds, crowdfunding has increasingly become a popular strategy for realizing cultural productions. There is, though, a lack of understanding cultural-creative crowdfunding from a broader-than-finance perspective, which is addressed in this paper by exploring how it functions beyond the obvious mechanism of raising money. By adopting a multiple-case design, this paper sheds empirical light on crowdfunding’s role as a complementary source of finance or a form of business model, and its function of gatekeeper for individuals starting their artistic careers. Based on cases spanning from the audiovisual industry to music and design, we elaborate on how the crowdfunding process shapes the professional path of diverse cultural-creative workers and their projects. Some creators enthusiastically embrace this entrepreneurial finance as core for their business where consumers share ownership over a pre-sold product, while others do not consider using crowdfunding again but (indirectly) recognize its role as an entry door to a new professional path in the sector. In sum, there is potential to elaborate on crowdfunding’s role for both artists’ career and cultural project development and this paper is among the first to suggest a theoretical model in this direction.