Why would I create an indie production of some kind for no money? Are you saying now if I want to make something I have to setup a gofundme and get it funded before I even make the product. That's fine for something, and ruins the artistic intent for other things. Imagine Star Wars being crowdfunded before it was made.
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.
> ...get it funded before I even make the product.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to do this. You could make the product, send it under a strict NDA to a variety of widely-trusted 3rd-party reviewers/critics, with whatever sort of protection against leaks you might require, then put the existing product for crowdfunded "ransom" (Like Blender was, after the original company went out of business), building in whatever return you might wish to ask for in exchange for bearing the ensuing risk. This doesn't require ordinary copyright protection at all, only a very limited-in-scope protection for private, unpublished stuff.
(The "ransom" model is in fact already potentially-applicable to a lot of existing content that's generally considered worthless, but that, much like Blender itself, might be valued more in the context of an open release. Transaction costs - namely, wrt. the exceedingly-common case of "orphan works", with unknown rights-holders - get in the way of it, however.)
Maybe, but piracy skirts that issue. Who's going to protect you when someone breaks the NDA? When someone steals your production copy? Piracy is a broad brush.
You produce whatever small part of your work you can afford to on couch change, pizza favors and family support and sell it. Fund the next part from the proceeds of the first.
It lives on today in webisodes and patreonage, or, hell, TV shows, but some of what we now consider great literature was produced as serialized chapters in magazines, and only after the fact bundled together as a single volume novel.
Maybe box-office blockbusters funded as multi-million dollar investments and released all at once were just a temporary aberration, like the "album".
If we reach 100k we'll make sure Han Solo shoots first.
It doesn't make sense. People should be paid for providing a service, whether it's a hamburger or a movie. You don't pay someone before the goods are delivered. The modern system of pre-funding and patronization is absurd for many projects.