Money for what? An exploration in music crowdfunding or P2P finance

Nowadays we witness the steady development of web-platforms that provide the players of the music system with new opportunities for action and interaction. These are not only technological artifacts but firms with their own business models. They attend musicians, managers and listeners with tools embedding specific frameworks and presenting features that make them more or less suitable to different appropriations. Therefore is important to study either their working and their different uses from different players, analyzing the connection between the two. In this paper I illustrate how a particular kind of platforms - music crowdfunding platforms - work, pointing to the functions and relationships they support, as well as to the industrial, social and cultural features of the music system they seem to foster. I will proceed analyzing what they afford with respect to the main players involved users, musicians and firms and how their use affect the relationships among the three.