Marije pointed me at liberapay, a website for long-term donations to projects/individuals you appreciate. I’m giving it a go..
Outwardly, liberapay looks similar to patreon, but the details are very different. I tried setting up a patreon fund before but it didn’t fit. I still have an on-going crowdfund (for the very overdue spicule album) so didn’t want to take on another one of those, and patreon is very similar to that. Patreon encourages you to communicate with your funders, reward them with secret ‘content’, and market yourself to get as many funders as possible. This doesn’t really work for me because realistically, I’m never going to get enough funding to justify time on marketing myself or creating ‘exclusives’, at least if I cost my time at a-n recommended rates.. Even if I did, I don’t want to spend my time on marketing, I want to spend it on making music and free software. Exclusive content is also against the principles of free software, I don’t want to only speak to those who can afford it.
Liberapay is different though, it’s about anonymous donations, so you don’t know who your contributors are, and contributions can’t be linked to rewards in any way. Liberapay themselves are a non-profit, don’t take a cut on contributions, and aren’t interested in training you up as a self-promoter..
I thought I’d start with seeing if people wanted to contribute to ongoing server (and dns registration) costs for toplap, algorave etc. Within a few hours, that was already covered! This feels surprisingly good. It’s a comparatively small amount every week but adds up to a lot over time, and it’s great to have the feeling that people value it, and that those with spare money are happy to contribute. It’s a bit weird not knowing anything about who is giving me money (unless they tell me), but I think this is really nice, as I don’t really want to feel like I need to treat people differently based on whether they are giving my projects, or how much.. and the lack of perks/rewards means people only give if they don’t have fixed expectations about what I’m going to produce in response.
So now on to the second step — contributing towards Tidal development.. It’s still difficult to apply this to my work, as most of it is around TidalCycles, and I’m nervous about bogging down that project with issues around who should get paid for doing what (although liberapay does allow distribution of donations).. I also don’t want to take the pleasure out of working on Tidal with outside pressure. But for now have nominated an aspect of Tidal I’m really keen to work on (communal docs) and will see how it goes. It’s not going to fund a significant percentage of my time, but it is hopefully going to help me work a bit more than usual, and generally push things forward.. Feel free to support this, and unless you’re shy, let me know if you do!
