Evolution, trends, and narratives of cultural crowdfunding: the case of Norway

Abstract

ABSTRACT With a lifelong path of funding struggles, cultural industries have been at the forefront of crowdfunding since its early stages in the beginning of this century. Worldwide, the volume of crowdfunding has been growing significantly and it has increasingly become a promising business model for cultural productions. However, research on cultural crowdfunding remains limited. The current study aims to understand how crowdfunding is shaping the cultural economy. We explore the evolution, trends and narratives of cultural crowdfunding, focusing on two crowdfunding platforms – Kickstarter and Bidra. By scrapping the universe of Norwegian cultural campaigns on these platforms in 2016–2021 and combining statistics with discourse analysis, the results demonstrate changes in cultural crowdfunding dynamics, with notable differences across cultural industries. Overall, cultural campaigns mainly acclaim artistic production and financial acquisition, also artists emphasize lack of finances (even in the case when public funding is given) and potential for product sales. This work demonstrates the growth and importance of cultural crowdfunding, especially for some industries (e.g. games), and highlights the need for cultural policy to consider crowdfunding as one of its instruments, extending, for instance, match-funding mechanisms. This study further contributes to the understanding of the cultural crowdfunding phenomenon for academics, policy-makers, and practitioners.