The relational forms of cultural-creative crowdfunding: A typology of practices through mapping platforms in Europe and Latin America

Abstract

Cultural-creative crowdfunding (CCCF) intersects the culture sector production chain and alternative finance technology as a global web-enabled phenomenon for funding cultural-creative activities. Yet, busking or aspects of patronage are not new to artists and cultural-creative agents; the novelty is doing so through a virtual intermediator space, a crowdfunding platform (CFP). CFPs have proliferated worldwide but the literature is embryonic and lacks further elaboration on how platform dynamics can impact the funding/financing patterns of specific sectors. In the case of the culture sector, given its unique attributes, specificities, and relational structuring, the impact of crowdfunding requires even more conceptual development, systematization, and potential policy instrumentalization. Hence, this study explores how CCCF has evolved and what different models (and channels) within multiple platforms were developed under the CCCF umbrella. Based on a combination of methods (tracking and trawling, Delphi, and categoric analysis), the current research maps the CFPs focusing on culture-creative projects throughout Europe and Latin America. The aim is to conceptualize a broader typology of CCCF practices that can better serve the cultural-creative circuit. This work is among the first to pursue such CCCF typology bridging cross-disciplinary understanding and real-world practices. This research, therefore, offers implications for interdisciplinary academics, practitioners, and policymakers by enabling the nuanced comprehension of the relational forms of CCCF as multiple-practices, expanding its boundaries amid a vaster umbrella of possible web-enabled genre (sub-)models to be adopted, legitimized, and systematized in (and by) the culture sector.