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In this Discussion
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Go Fund Me. Anyone want to buy this lad a 1962 Strat?
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Comments
Good to see that as he's been unable to manipulate enough punters to pay for his guitar, he has managed to gets its owner to accept half the money and the promise of the rest on monthly instalments....
I wanted to get the kitchen knocked through to the dining room next year but we can't afford it anymore. I didn't realise that didn't matter though, I'm going to set up a go fund me.
If he'd sold albums to buy the guitar nobody would have batted an eyelid. He also probably wouldn't have made enough to buy the guitar, given music sales these days. But people can see the correlation between 'hard work' and 'reward' so that's cool.
In the modern era of music and YouTube, hard work and reward aren't so obviously linked anymore. You can have a popular song or album and make relatively little money back from the investment to record it, you can have a YouTube channel that helps many people and see only small direct rewards unless you hit a critical mass of regular viewers - something not many achieve... Even guys like Ola Englund and Ryan Bruce make most of their money outside of YouTube - opportunities that were enabled by it for sure, but YouTube content itself isn't paying their salaries.
I see no actual reason, beyond moral judgement, that he can't say "hey, I know you like what I do, and if you want to help me out in return here's what I'd really like." Nobody has been forced to do anything, and yes he has to live with the fact that some people will negatively judge him for asking - like any other action in life. I'm not massively familiar with the guy but just looking at his YT playlist, there are multiple hours of content in his Frusciante series alone.
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Objectively looking at it, the make a product for the prices that made business sense 20 years ago model doesn't really work the same way anymore with music. Album sales are down, streaming pays very little to niche artists, and people expect to be able to access an amount of educational information at zero cost - even the paid services tend to have a good amount of free content on YouTube and you could probably piece together all the information you'd ever need without paying at all.
I see no reason why more albums aren't released on platforms where you can pay more if you want. Furthermore I don't see why there couldn't be a tipping culture at live shows, especially for smaller acts. I do understand the scepticism towards the "pay me then I'll create it" model, personally I have not funded any campaigns like that, but by the same token that's really up to the fans to decide if they want to take that risk.
But pride, jealousy, and shame are pretty powerful forces and I guess that's just the way people are. What's interesting is this forum is mostly older guys who were around back when people bought albums. It'd be interesting to hear the conversations of this generations teenage music fans, who've grown up in the post Napster era.
It isn't underhand, dishonest, a swindle etc: he has said plain and simple, can I have some money for this guitar please?
and it worked. Fair play really.
And he's a better guitarist than I.
Surely the begging video in question is BS in itself, no?
So where's the strong argument that it is BS? I'm not especially emotional with money or logic, so the argument it's purely begging and begging is purely wrong doesn't work for me.
He's primarily addressing his own audience, which he built up via YouTube... looking at his channel there are several hours worth of free to access content. His channel has 4.9 million views, It'd be a fair assumption that many 10s of thousands of people have benefited in some way from his videos.
There is no legal reason he can't set up a Go Fund Me page. Can he be judged for it? Yes. But is that judgement based on anything beyond taste and morals - I've not seen a strong argument otherwise.
There is no reason why someone providing a service cannot be paid for something in unconventional, yet legal ways.
The way I rationalise this is he's monetised his fanbase towards a relevant purchase. The only difference between this and any other payment mechanism is the order in which it has happened is unconventional.
The fact he was able to raise so much money shows his fanbase was willing to value his creative output at that level, of their own free will. Why additional layers of payment/product are necessary to reach that point I don't really understand... if people want to give him the money then they can. He's not obliged to go do XYZ tasks, create ABC products, and charge pre-determined prices based on the economics of a previous decade.
Hes hardly 'manipulated' people
he asked for money, people gave him money, he's spent it on the thing he said he was going to.....
Bitchy comments about his hairline ain't gonna change anything dude.
A great idea, assuming you write/produce/present/edit a popular series of cooking shows based in your kitchen, I can't see anything wrong with it.
Good luck fella.
I was going to say "I don't suppose Dave gives a flying fuck what anyone here thinks" but I didn't want to swear, so I didn't.
I was also going to say "Daily Mail comments are thataway -----------> just use the hashtag #SmallMindedBigot" but I didn't want to get more negative replies, so I didn't.
So in the end, I just posted "Dave has a rabbit. Which is nice" above. Much better, eh? :-)
You can also see it as some guy just asking for help to get something, which I don't have an issue with as there's nothing dishonest or BS about it. How many of us as kids would have dreams like playing a guitar in your local shop and the shop owner being so blown aware by our potential that they offer to give us the guitar? This guy has just found a successful way of trying to do that!
I think it's perfectly valid to say that he's just used an unconventional way to monetise a service that he was providing, and fair play to him. It's for him to evaluate over time whether generating about a third of the cost of the guitar was the best way of cashing in on the goodwill equity he'd built up.
I think what a lot of people found a bit irksome was all the hand wringing on the original video. "ah....this is a hard video to make.....it feels so awkward to ask, I really hate it...." Well don't then, mate. If you're asking for money, ask for money. Don't ask for money and then make out it's all somehow distasteful to you....
To make an attempt to compensate this unfair request, he put his good ol' squier on the plate to the person who 'donated' the most money. A quick calculation shows that there's roughly a 3400% increase between the squier and the '62 strat. 3400%! Okay, it's not one person donating all the money; however, from Dave's perspective it ain't a bad turn around at all.
Yes, he provides videos on YouTube, but so do a lot of people. It's a voluntary pastime that should be done because you enjoy what you do, not to take advantage of your fanbase and exhort money from them in a roundabout way. If on the other hand you do become a successful YouTube hero and consequently make money from it, then great stuff, genuinely. Despite the love/hate of Chappers, at least he's grafted for his lot.
In the second video we see that Dave has got his strat, how he's gushing over it, how he claims it's "life-changing", how he can't thank his fans enough, and how it couldn't have happened without them. The truth is it could've happened without them, obvious methods raised in previous posts.
If he'd just mentioned on his videos "if you like what I do and you'd like make a donation, then go to this link here" and maybe with "I'm saving for a '62 strat", it would have been received far better. But no; a full-on, unprincipled, no messing about, give-me-your-money video, which, might I add was just plain awful to watch.
Finally, call me a cynic but to my mind there's no evidence that what he has is even a '62 strat. For all we know, his fans have been paying off his debts and the strat we saw on the videos was a souped up Encore he got down from the loft. Regardless, he got what he wanted, he's happy, his fans are happy, and if it the real deal, he's got himself a sound investment, an investment that will see him laughing to the bank one day and his fans feeling like they've had their pants down.
That's why I think it's BS.
I'm not suggesting anything will change that 'dude' - I'm suggesting that those who gave him money may well have been had.
I'm happy if you wish to view this as cynicism - but if you think I'm jealous of him or anyone else - you're just plain wrong....
I wouldn't say it was the same kind of thing at all to be honest.
Buskers are street entertainers and they don't tell you that they need 7 grand....well, not the ones I see anyway.
Right, see that still doesn't convince me.
The guy isn't a natural salesman so of course any kind of request for money won't be smooth. Offering the cheap guitar is a typical thing with fundraising sites - donations get recognised with rewards... there's been at least one member here who ran crowd funding for an album and they offered a range of rewards. The point isn't like for like donation and reward but I'm sure you know that.
Just because a platform is free to view doesn't mean the content has no value. It's for the consumers of that content to decide. Much of the free to use content on the internet is generating some money for someone - so a direct link between creator and consumer is surely the ideal scenario.
His language and reactions are all part and parcel of the social media age. If you watch enough YT channels you'll hear the same stock lines about stuff not being possible without the fans etc... it's not just Dave. See pretty much any gamer on YT and Twitch. Large fan base gamers can make enough from YT but smaller channels often do Twitch streams and take donations, even reacting in real time to them.
Objectively, if it is ok for him to run a donations page then I don't see the difference between that and this, he's just stated what he wants to buy. It seems people want some kind of fantasy disconnect between money and what people want to buy. Objectively all he's done is fill in the blank. "If you like my channel please donate [because I'd like blank]"
In the comment about the busker below - they don't tell you what they're saving for... if they did would that change your mind? There was a story in the press recently that good buskers can make £50/hr in a city centre, if they tell you they're saving for a BMW would you decide to not donate?
See this is where it absolutely is a jealousy based argument. If it's cool he can ask for donations based on his content, but not if he buys something deemed expensive with that money, then the game changer is what he intends to buy and the judgement of it. If he'd said nothing about his intentions all then bought the guitar there's literally no change in anything except the story told.
I admit the idea of it not being a genuine guitar also crossed my mind. But I don't have the knowledge to prove that anyway. If it is intentionally so then that's fraud, but there's no reason to believe that's the case currently.