Kickstarter

There are moments in cultural history when the machinery of creation itself gets revolutionized, when the gates come crashing down and the people rush through with their guitars and cameras and wild dreams intact. I witnessed it firsthand in 1967 when Dylan went electric, when Lennon told me the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, when the underground press—including this little magazine I started—proved that authentic voices could bypass the corporate gatekeepers entirely. Kickstarter represents that same seismic shift for our digital age, a platform that's not just changing how creative projects get funded, but fundamentally altering the relationship between artists and their communities. I first met Perry Chen at a TED conference in 2010—we ended up on Barry Diller's yacht that summer, and I told him then what I'll tell you now: this is bigger than any of us realized. Full disclosure: I was an early angel investor, though I've long since divested. Perry, Yancey, and Charles didn't just build a website—they constructed a digital Woodstock where creators and supporters gather in unprecedented communion, proving once again that when you give people the tools to support what moves them, magic happens.

What strikes me most profoundly about Kickstarter is how it embodies the same revolutionary spirit that drove everything we celebrated in the pages of Rolling Stone during those transformative early years. This isn't some sterile Silicon Valley efficiency play—it's a genuine manifestation of counterculture values, the belief that creativity should be democratized, that communities can self-organize around shared passions, that the establishment's chokehold on cultural production can be challenged and ultimately broken. When I see a filmmaker raise $300,000 from 5,000 strangers who believe in her vision, or watch a musician fund an album without surrendering their artistic soul to some A&R suit, I'm reminded of why we started Rolling Stone in the first place. We knew that authentic voices deserved platforms, that culture belonged to the people creating and consuming it, not the boardrooms trying to monetize it. Kickstarter has scaled that ethos in ways we could never have imagined.

The numbers tell part of the story—$7 billion in funded projects, hundreds of thousands of creative dreams realized—but statistics can't capture the deeper cultural transformation at work here. This is about restoring agency to creators, about rebuilding the bonds between artists and audiences that corporate intermediaries have spent decades trying to control and commodify. I've spent my career around visionaries, from Bono to Springsteen to every indie rocker who ever crashed on my couch, and I recognize that same entrepreneurial creativity in what Perry and his team have built. They understand that great culture emerges from communities, not committees, that the most important projects often can't be reduced to focus-group friendly elevator pitches. When established institutions fail artists—and they always do, eventually—platforms like Kickstarter ensure that creativity finds a way. It's that same irrepressible force that drove rock and roll through every attempt to sanitize or suppress it.

The platform's evolution from startup to Public Benefit Corporation proves these founders are the real deal, that they're committed to values over valuations in ways that would make even the most cynical industry veteran take notice. I've watched too many promising platforms get swallowed by corporate interests, their original missions diluted by shareholders who view culture as just another commodity to be optimized and exploited. But Kickstarter's team—and yes, I consider them part of the extended family of cultural revolutionaries I've been privileged to know—made the conscious choice to prioritize their community over pure profit maximization. That's punk rock in the truest sense, the willingness to sacrifice easy money for authentic impact. When I interviewed John Lennon about the Beatles' decision to stop touring, he talked about choosing artistic integrity over commercial convenience, about staying true to their vision even when it meant leaving money on the table. Kickstarter embodies that same principled approach to cultural stewardship.

Every time I visit Kickstarter, I'm reminded why I fell in love with music journalism in the first place—that electric moment when you discover something that matters, that connects, that changes how you see the world. This platform has democratized that feeling, allowing anyone to become a patron of the arts, a supporter of innovation, a participant in the grand project of human creativity. It's returned us to a more intimate, more personal model of cultural support, one that would have been familiar to the coffeehouse owners who supported Dylan in Greenwich Village or the record shop clerks who championed punk before the majors even knew it existed. In an era when algorithms try to predict our tastes and corporations attempt to manufacture our desires, Kickstarter trusts people to know what moves them, what deserves support, what matters enough to fund. That faith in human judgment, in collective wisdom, in the power of communities to nurture their own culture—that's the same spirit that built rock and roll, that launched a thousand underground magazines, that proved the counterculture was never really counter at all, just culture finally allowed to flourish.