Songkick's Detour, Gathr -- The New Wave of Demand-Driven Media Distribution/Crowd-Funding

The Internet.  The promise of connectivity.  The promise of reaching out to anyone, anywhere.  The promise of new never-before-possible business models -- and, for media, disruptive new demand-driven distribution models.

For me, some of the most exciting audience-driven media "experiments" are happening right now.  Here are two of my favorites, which I urge you to check out:

(1) Songkick -- you may know the service/app.  It allows you to easily track your favorite artists and alert you when they come to play in a city near you, so that you never miss another live performance again.  You can, of course, also easily link to buy tix, etc.   Yes, that's cool -- but relatively straightforward.

But, want something even cooler?  Then check out Songkick's new "Detour" service.  This is something beyond cool -- it is downright revolutionary.  It is demand-driven distribution at its finest.  Specifically, Detour enables communities to essentially band together (pun intended), reach out directly to a specific artist or band, and then commit individual "micro-payments" (to pool their funds) to lure that artist/band to come to their community to play for them.  This is crowd-funding at its finest -- in a context particularly near-and-dear to me -- live music events.  In effect, the community itself creates a new tour date -- scheduling a concert that previously would not have been scheduled.  Together, the artist/band and the community create a new experience that was never before possible -- all enabled by the collective power of online community.  

(2) Gathr -- I have written about this service before.  This service is another great example of new demand-driven distribution in the media world via crowd-funding.  Gathr is analogous to Songkick's "Detour" but, instead of live music, Gathr focuses on independent films (yes, pun intended again) -- and Gathr gives indie filmmakers a fighting chance to find an audience for their frequently powerful, yet sadly frequently overlooked, films.  

How does Gathr do it?  A spate of "Movie Captains" -- i.e., passionate sponsors to get the film watched -- promote local screenings in individual cities and communities.  These ambassadors create audience demand -- individuals who commit to seeing the film by plunking down their credit cards in advance to reach a minimum threshold for an audience.  If that monetary tipping point is reached, then the film will be screened.  If not, then no credit cards are charged.

These are exciting new models.  These are exciting new sources of revenues for artists and content creators -- which, of course, spurs creativity.  These are exciting for consumers -- and fulfilling in myriad ways.

This innovative new companies deserve to succeed.  And, certainly, companies of this ilk will.  We are still in the very early innings of the demand-driven crowd-funding revolution.