The barriers facing artists’ use of crowdfunding platforms: Personality, emotional labor, and going to the well one too many times

Popular discourse frames crowdfunding as a way for those traditionally locked out of financing opportunities to leverage the connectivity of the Internet to widen their reach beyond their immediately accessible networks and secure funds for a wide variety of projects. Using a survey of crowdfunding project founders in the culture industries, we explored the relationship between certain social and psychological characteristics and attitudes toward crowdfunding. We examined how extraversion, surface acting, emotional labor, the social composition of project backers, and project success all relate to enjoyment and future intentions of using crowdfunding in the culture industries. Crowdfunding appears to advantage culture producers with particular personality structures while disadvantaging others. In sum, crowdfunding seems beneficial but might be useful only for particular types of artists and therefore should not supplant other traditional financing modes.