Crowdfunding is all the rage these days, isn’t it? People are crowdfunding their hardware startups, crowdfunding their insurance bills, even crowdfunding their honeymoons. And now you can crowdfund concerts and other events. Online ticketing startup Picatic is now offering up a platform that lets promoters, artists, and venues ensure they make a profit on events by crowdfunding them.
EventTilt will allow promoters to create event pages with artist and venue, letting fans pay before the event is actually booked. Once a proposed concert or other event reaches a certain threshold set by the organizer — usually the break-even point for putting the show on — then the event actually gets put together.
Users who help fund events through EventTilt will receive discounted tickets and maybe some type of merch, swag, or perks as a thank you gift. And those who contribute to events that don’t get fully funded get their money back. The whole thing ends up being like Kickstarter for concerts.
Picatic was founded in 2008 and competes in the burgeoning online ticketing world against sites like Eventbrite. The introduction of EventTilt, while still pretty small, will give Picatic a new way to get more events off the ground and to collect more revenue along the way. Since promoters will be able to de-risk the process of organizing a concert or other events, it’s possible that more will be booked through its system.
Of course, Picatic isn’t alone in its pursuit of concert or event crowdfunding. Brazilian startup Queremos recently launched at TechCrunch Disrupt and is bringing its own crowdfunding platform for events to the U.S. market. Huge Labs recently unveiled a platform for booking authors to speak about their works and crowdfunding those events called Togather. And there are others, like GigFunder, which do the same kind of thing.
Just as there are multiple crowdfunding platforms for creating hardware projects, there’s likely to be more than one of these “Kickstarter for events” companies to survive. But for the idea to really take off, one will probably have to reach critical mass and become the go-to place for cool events. Which one will it be?