When we last left off with the Loog Guitar by Rafael Atijas it had blown past its funding goals on Kickstarter in early 2011 and shipped with much fanfare making it one of the first successful Kickstarter projects on our radar. In the interim it’s become a mini-phenomenon and, most important, people have started using the three-stringed instruments to record albums.
Case in point: Pip Blom is a 16-year-old singer-songwriter who wrote an entire record using the Loog. You can listen to the whole thing on Bandcamp and she is selling the albums to pay for a trip to Teenage Kicks, a band camp in Vlieland in the Netherlands. In short, it’s a crowdfunded project that helped student complete another crowdfunded projects. To paraphrase an old lady: It’s crowdfunding all the way down.
The music itself is quite charming and well-recorded and Pip herself is ready to appear at the Glastonbury festival, if they’ll have her.
This cool connection shows the power of crowdfunding. Rafael wanted to make a fun, inexpensive guitar for kids and he was able to depend on the kindness of the Internet to help him make it. In turn, Pip can use that same guitar to follow her dream just as any student with a Loog can learn a few chords and make some really nice music. When people talk about the value of crowdsourcing, this is what they mean: the little accidents that connect people to help push the state of the art forward. It’s not just a pre-order engine, it’s an engine of creativity.