The founder of creative crowdfunding platform Patreon was driven to establish the company by the "demoralising" discrepancy between feeling like a success and being paid like one. Jonah Weiner considers whether Patreon can provide a realiable business model for creatives in the internet age.
'It's 11:16 am on a Saturday, and Jack Conte—bright-eyed, bushy-bearded—is zigzagging around a cramped Los Angeles recording studio, dodging eight musicians, two cameramen, a sound engineer, and a profusion of instruments, cords, and mic stands. “Let's do it!” he cries out, sounding martial and chipper at once, like a high school drama teacher. Conte's been here since 9 am, leading everyone through a packed day of recording. When the clock strikes 11:17 and the doing-it has yet to commence, he cries out again, “Let's do it, let's do it, let's go!”
Together with his wife, the singer-songwriter Nataly Dawn, Conte is one-half of a band called Pomplamoose. They've spent 11 years together building an online following, mostly on the strength of their idiosyncratic, hyper-proficient pop covers—Lady Gaga's “Telephone” featuring eight-part harmonies, a xylophone, and a toy piano (9.5 million YouTube views); Beyoncé's “Single Ladies” arranged for upright piano, jazz bass, and an old Polaroid camera repurposed as a percussion instrument (11 million views). When they started out, Conte worked on the band full-time; he and Dawn would usually play all the instruments themselves. They also did all the arranging, filming, and editing. Making one video could take a week.
But then Conte got a high-powered day job working in tech, and to keep their following alive, he and Dawn had to start squeezing an elaborate and intense production routine into the crevices of his schedule. Though they live in the Bay Area, these days the couple flies to LA, where session musicians are plentiful, to crank out music as Pomplamoose. “We come down here once a month and record four songs,” Conte says. “It's a production flow—an assembly line.”' ... Keep reading on Wired