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How superfans drive the entertainment business

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, via Pono Music

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, via Pono Music

This is hardcore, says Slate .

Superfans are driving the entertainment business. Neil Young’s Pono digital musical player has raised more than $4 million from fans on Kickstarter. Yikes.

The lead in the article talks about Neil but the rest is a tale of how things fans are driving the things they love through these sorts of campaigns.

It’s been a big month for small projects on Kickstarter, writes Slate author Jon Nathanson. First a consortium of musicians and industry veterans, fronted by Neil Young, used the site to launch Pono, a digital music player and download service. Young and his partners set a fundraising goal of $800,000, to be reached within 35 days.

Instead, they met that goal in under a day, then broke $2.5 million in their first 60 hours. At the time of this writing, Pono has exceeded $4 million in pledges. (The campaign will run through April 15; Pono is scheduled to launch in October.)

A few days later, Warner Bros. released a Veronica Mars movie in theaters and online. The film grossed $2 million at only 291 theaters worldwide, with a healthy $6,945 per-screen average. The movie owed its existence to Kickstarter—Rob Thomas, creator of the original TV series, raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter last year to fund production of the feature.

überfans.

Nathanson writes: “But crowdfunding isn’t catering to the mainstream crowd. When 3 million of us pledged $480 million to Kickstarter projects in 2013, we didn’t establish any new industries or shake up any old ones. Instead, we identified ourselves as the early adopters: the hardcores, the überfans. We’re the kind of people who, in absence of Kickstarter, would have bought the special edition of a Veronica Mars DVD or paid extra for better seats at a Neil Young concert. We’re the kind of people who download all the value-added content in our favorite video games. When something’s labeled “collectible,” we’re the ones collecting it.”

Read more at: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bet/2014/03/kickstarter_neil_young_veronica_mars_how_hard_core_fans_drive_the_entertainment.html

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