Crowdfunding: Methods, Opportunities and Applications in the Czech Music Industry

This thesis focuses on the issue of crowdfunding – its methods, opportunities and applications in the Czech music industry. The first part of this work clarifies basic concepts from the fundraising sphere, thus attempting to define crowdfunding and set its mechanisms into both - historical and alternative contexts of financing culture within the present day. In an essayistic manner, the author outlines changes of the music industry within the world as well as the local market, spanning from the second half of the twentieth century up to the present, where it is possible to observe first impulses towards seeking alternative resources of financing culture, especially music. The theoretical part of the thesis explains how crowdfunding campaigns operate, or should operate, and what their specifics are. This work maps out the formation and functioning of crowdfunding abroad as well as in the Czech environment, while focusing on operators who provide a platform for executing crowdfunding campaigns and work out the campaigns’ analyses and comparison. This thesis’ research part describes crowdfunding campaigns’ mechanisms that concentrate on music in practice within the Czech environment. Providing examples of two case studies, this work brings qualitative analyses of successful music projects that used opportunities of crowdfunding in the Czech music industry in 2012 and 2014. As a part of the aforementioned studies, the author presents unstructured interviews with campaign creators that result in specifics, advantages as well as drawbacks, regarding application of crowdfunding in music.