There was a vsauce video that asked a question about the potential of kickstarter to replace Hollywood, and he touches on ways that Hollywood might try to exploit it. So I figured I should write what I think the inevitable conclusion of the crowdfunding "revolution" is, how and why it happened, and what comes next.
Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and its kin all center around the idea of consumers paying for the creation of things they want, often with "perks" for donating certain amounts, often (but not always) including a copy of the thing made. Small donations for things like video games often don't get you a copy of the game, which to me seems very backwards, but I'll get to that.
The major issues with crowdfunding are twofold - one, there is no investor protection clause, if a project reaches its funding goals, you are out money and hoping they make whatever you are banking on. While there is nothing inherently bad about this - it just means you are dumb to invest in people you don't have reasonable expectations will produce the product you want, and if they turn around and run off with your money its your fault for making a risky investment.
The problem with no protections is that unproven and untested developers / produces see magnitudes less interest and contribution than already entrenched groups that have delivered in the past - which is reasonable given the lack of protection, because if you have to choose between something brand new from some random guy trying to launch a project out of their garage, or an industry expert trying to create a sequel to some IP they own, you are obviously going with the latter because you can reasonably assume they will actually make the product. But I'll get to why this is catastrophically bad in a bit.
The second major issue is that you are conflating the real role of crowdfunders - people acting as investors in the creation of new products, ideas, or initiatives - with donation tier gifts that are supposed to appease them of their money. It is an unnecessary indirection, but it is in many ways systemic of the first point - since you have no guarantees your project will actually happen, much more realistic "prizes" work to abate the issue and appease the masses.
The problem is this isn't a macroscopic solution to what I would argue is a systemic issue in the 21st century due to automation and globalization that will see the death of labor markets for physical unskilled work and an increase in the number of people who don't need to work mindless jobs. This means more people can, and should be driven to, enter creative ventures, and anything less than crowdfunding with perverse information ubiquity is disingenuous of society and all the technological innovation made up to this point.
The end goal needs to be that consumers with money have a means of finding people offering to pursue and create new information, head new initiatives, and craft new products for those interested in them, and the ability to directly invest in what you want to see it made. For one, it is the only ethical solution to the tyranny of IP and resolution of broken property rights, and second, it is the best way to resolve the current economic spiral into extreme inequality between the wealthy investor and the paycheck to paycheck laborer.
Back to my first issue, the reason that having no protections is bad is that it means entrenched market forces are disproportionately invested in because they have proven track records - their histories make them less risky to invest in, and that would drive people to put their money in what they feel is the least risky, to see the things they want made with the least chance of losing their investment, and that means entering a market would require an excess of work, often to produce something of similar caliber without the crowdfunding that is meant to enable small ventures from working.
The only solution is to abate the risk aspect. Any venture that operates in this new dichotomy will need to rigorously calcuate their expenses and obectives and produce realistic goals so that people can invest in them without fear of the venture taking the money and running - it would require some legal enforcement, maybe via contract with the exchange operator (aka, the kickstarter.com in this scenario) that and venture proposing needs to actually make what they say or else face lawsuit of fraudulent business practices and monetary extortion. The legal system is a giant mess as well, but that is tangential - in a much more functional legal system, the provider of the exchange service would prosecute any project that fraudulently takes the money and doesn't deliver a product for its "investors" interests, entirely to mitigate the risk of investment in unproven ventures.
Of course, that means anyone going into a crowdfunded project needs to fear being sued for not delivering. That is good. That means they have to be realistic, and that the projects investors can reasonably expect that they get what they pay for.
The resolution to the IP atrocities comes in the form of these projects that are funded being the means to provide the wellbeing and livelihoods of the creators for the duration of the venture - when they produce the product, they give a windowed release target, and meet it - otherwise they are liable for fraudulence. They propose how much they would need to live off for the duration of the venture plus additional expenses, and it is up to the crowdfunders to determine if they are a worthy investment. If they reach their target monetary goal, they get the money and are contractually obliged to return the product in the time frame specified.
This also means the donation goals are unnecessary and detract from the purpose - paying content creators (or any idea creator) for creating such ideas. The information based results of their labor (the blueprints for a robot they build, the movie they make, the program they write) should be released in as close to public domain or at the least an open attribution license as possible, as part of the contract. Once the product is funded by people that want to put the money where their mouth is to see it made, it should be freely available like the information it is. If you do crowdfund the invention of scarce resources like, say, building a cold fusion reactor for a billion dollars, the schematics and blueprints better be public domain, but the reactor itself is obviously owned by the original venture to sell electricity as they wish, because it is finite tangible property with scarcity, and you can't just steal it. Of course, it is up to the contract between the investors and the venture - if they want to build a fusion reactor and give it to the local government that is entirely in their contractual rights, they just need to provide them obfuscated to their investors.
The reason this matters so much is that investment right now is a rigged, closed game for the economic elite. The stock market isn't an accurate investment scheme - many companies on the stock markets could care less what their shares trade at, because they already did an IPO and got their cash reserves. After that, the trading rate never impacts them unless they release more shares into the market. People exchanging company ownership with other people doesn't impact the company at all unless the shareholders take advantage of their 51%+ ownership collectively. Dividend payouts are unrelated to the trading value of a stock, they depend on profit margins. So in practice, the only way to actually invest in new ideas is to be in a closed circle of wealthy investors surrounding an industry who plays the chessboard of ideas to their advantage with behind the scenes agreements and ventures that the public can't engage in - be they agreements between friends to try something new, or a wealthy person just taking a million dollars and trying something for a profit privately - those aren't open investments in what people want.
This becomes more important when we consider we are losing dramatic amounts of middle class power with the decline in income and savings - people don't have the spending power or push to drive the markets anymore because of gross inequality, and the best way to fix that is to open people to supporting one another without their corporate overlord interests controlling what they can buy or enjoy. Moving the engine of creativity and investment back into the hands of the masses means people see what they collectively want made, made, and those that traditionally pull the economic strings lose considerable power if the people paying for the content creators are the people themselves, rather than money hungry investment firms and publishers.
It is absolutely an end game - the collective funding of idea creation is the endgame of every information based industry, but to get there will require considerable cultural, legal, and economic shifts away from the poisonous miasma we exist in today. I hope it can happen in my lifetime, the degree of information freedom we could see in such a world would be wonderful to behold.
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