Last Monday, after 48 days of rigorous self-promoting, the members of local prog hop quintet Rise of Saturn found themselves one hour and $614 away from reaching their $5,000 Kickstarter.com fundraising goal.

Kickstarter is an online "crowdfunding" platform for artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and other inspired types to raise money for their creative endeavors. The site was most famously and fruitfully used by four NYU computer science students to support their contruction of a private, open source "anti-Facebook" social network. Their "Diaspora Project" generated such a widespread buzz that by the time the drive concluded in June, they'd collected $200,641 in pledges, far exceeding their $10,000 goal.

The no-risk appeal to Kickstarter is its all-or-nothing model — projects must be fully funded or no money changes hands, and a project's success is directly linked to the amount of time and effort the project's creators put into achieving their goal. Unfortunately, this meant that if Rise of Saturn failed to reach $5,000 by the drive's end, they'd have put in all that time and effort for nothing. "It was nerve-wracking," bassist/singer (and occasional CL contributor) Ivan Peña told me when we chatted about it a few days later. "All day Monday, there was a flood of Facebook updates of everybody trying to help us out with the final push. It was pretty much a group effort. We were text messaging people, we were e-mailing, calling, posting …"

Rise of Saturn's final push proved successful, their final total a triumphant $5,047. "Times are tough and the fact that we could raise $5,000 like this, just using social media and a network of friends and family … it's amazing."

Kickstarter is for creative ideas only; charity projects, causes, "fund my life"-type expenses, or any other random financial ventures are denied. In fact, to initiate a project, interested parties must submit a proposal to Kickstarter's small team of artists and technologists, who evaluate it on its creative merits and make sure all the guidelines are met.

This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2010.