you want to know my guess? kickstarter already took their cut and bought some limited edition air jordans or something. of course they wouldn’t want to acknowledge the situation… I’m glad that something told me “wait until there’s a product before you throw money at this” because at the time, I was looking for something exactly like this.
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yeah kickstarter took their cut for sure, what a scam
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New product creation usually ends in failure. You don’t normally see it because solo entrepreneurs usually fail before anyone has heard of them. New products created inside medium or large companies are quietly put six feet under when they fail, or sometimes get rolled into existing business units.
This is difficult to square with consumer expectations because the few products that will ultimately be successful are needles hidden amongst the haystacks of eventual failures.
At one end of the spectrum, crowdsourcing platforms could turn the knob to max caution and become an amazon, only selling packed and ready to ship products. They might be particularly friendly to new vendors, but the vendor has to offer inventory.
At the other end of the spectrum, they could turn the knob all the way down to maximize risk. If you can select for projects that have a high payoff when successful and can arrange so that the sum of successes exceeds the cost of the sum of the failures, then you can make large amounts of money. This doesn’t work for consumers because there are many of us with few currency units and each of us wants to receive the shiny new product that we pay for.
Something like a Patreon might be more appropriate: subscribe to product designers and receive points for each currency unit you pay in. When a product is released, you have an option to use your points to buy the product, and can buy additional points as needed with cash. That would probably scare off most backers and make the platform unviable.
Another option would be to encourage projects to charge far more for new products. If the thing is expected to sell at $200/unit in production volumes, the crowdfund price should be at least $400-$600. This will also scare away backers, but probably fewer than the subscription model. High prices need to come with something like prestige for backing the project early. They also give more funding and leeway to the project which increases its odds of success.
I don’t think of crowdfunding as a scam because I think I understand the logic of how it works under the covers. The platforms have made a series of decisions about how the game is played and I prefer to buy finished music products. If you have a different model for how early stage projects should be funded and your crowdfunded project doesn’t meet those expectations then I can see how crowdfunding would look like a scam to you.
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Some gifts are appreciated, some aren’t.
Sometimes a person who wants to struggle less can make great things with simple kit, sometimes a person can have fun and build, or sometimes even the easy stuff doesn’t spark any ideas.
I see parallels to AI hype, I’m all for democratization of creativity.
But there’s been a certain sort of person online super evangelical about “AI” everything, posts about them as their special interest, all the updates, loves to go on rants about “Big Art” and how they’re so greedy to want to make any income, and how freelancers are going to get “disrupted”.
But… dog, you’re not even making dogshit, you’re just LARPing as someone who will one day create something as justification for how much you hate another person’s creative hobbies.
Then there’s the other sort of person constantly posting on facebook with “prints” of stock art elderly people “as mermaids” or whatever Midjourney prompt they clapped themselves on the back for, which I really wish I didn’t have spammed in my eyeholes.
I have a love for amateur art, even “bad” photography is an insight into someone’s spirit.
Anyway, toys make for excellent music, perhaps we need more bendable tablehooters.
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This has a strong whiff of “people aren’t creating art the way I want them to create art and that’s bad!” It’s fine if you don’t think you’d have fun with this – I don’t think I would either – but people are allowed to have fun, and I definitely don’t believe that “easy” instruments make worse music than “professional” instruments. Keep in mind that 303s were intended to be the “easy” replacement for bassists in bands that didn’t have one! A similar statement is true for most well-known 80s drum machines. Today’s “easy” instrument is tomorrow’s revered classic.
I’m also wholly unconvinced by arguments that appeal to “music theory.” Often when people use that phrase they mean something very narrow and specific, i.e. theory as it pertains to a specific group of long-dead European composers. I started college as a piano major and have spent the nearly 30 years since trying to unlearn that pernicious and narrow-minded view of music. It’s fine if you’re into the theory of chords & melodies & which 9th chords go well with this or that position in the circle of fifths, but be aware that lots of people strongly disagree that this flavor of “music theory” is worthwhile!
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There’s nothing narrow-minded about advocating for practical knowledge, regardless of the field of study. I would venture to say that’s never true.
Ironically, you are making this statement from the standpoint of someone with a general understanding of music theory, for which you applied yourself, and are therefore able to form an opinion of your own with the perspective you gained.
Of course, ignorance and snobbery exist on both fronts, but it is sophomoric to suggest that real knowledge could ever be an impediment.
Most of the adept musicians I know have a healthy sense of humility, know exactly where they stand in the grand scheme of things, and are content to keep learning as they mature as people and players.
How can you go wrong with that?
At any rate, the original question was whether or not “quick-fix music gadgets promise beginners too much”. And indeed, they do. That’s not to say you can’t have fun with them. Surely, that point of view is reserved for only the rarest of pessimists.
Cheers!
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