Patronage Without the Middleman

Hey everyone! If you’re at all involved with Patreon as a creator, patron or both, you’ve by now heard about their changes in how they’re covering processing fees. I’m not going to go into detail on this, as a few people have already done some great analysis.

What I do want to talk about is something I mentioned on Twitter in response to the uproar from Patreon creators about the changes. I was asked to expound on it by several people there and so here I am writing this post! This is actually the first blog post on Lineage Artistry’s website, so welcome everyone! Lineage Artistry is run by me and my husband, singer/songwriter Bradford Loomis. The website where we applied our Patronage page is Bradford’s music website, bradfordloomis.com

My husband is a full time independent, nationally touring musician who has played 210 shows in 2017. Many of these were house shows, a touring model that removes the middleman in a way that puts more money in our pockets. We learned about this model from singer-songwriter Shannon Curtis and her husband/producer Jamie Hill who are now our very dear friends. They literally wrote the book on house concerts–you can find it on Amazon. That being said, this was our first foray into doing everything we could to avoid paying other people to facilitate Bradford’s career.

The next step came when we were crowdsourcing Bradford’s latest album in late 2016, Bravery and the Bell. Again, our friends Shannon and Jamie told us about how they do crowdsourcing using their own website and a web store called Limited Run and we applied that model to our crowdfunding and ran a successful campaign raising nearly $13,000 to fund the record which was released in March of 2017.

It was during this season that we began to consider a Patreon page but didn’t have a lot of time to throw at it until this fall. While we were brainstorming monetary levels and packages I ask Bradford why we even needed to go through a third party website. His response was basically, “How would we process monthly payments?” We really couldn’t think of another reason why to go with Patreon. They boast over 50,000 users so there’s very little chance of floating to the top in order to get special recognition and honestly the idea that random people are perusing the site just looking for cool things to subscribe to is a bit far-fetched. Between his personal and fan pages on Facebook Bradford has around 6,000 people in his supportive community (subtracting for crossover between pages) so we felt we likely had a good base from which to find those who would be interested in subscribing. Our patronage page has been live for two weeks, we’ve only pushed it for one and we already have 25 subscribers.

Let me state really clearly: we have no beef with Patreon. We do not use them but we did spend a lot of time on the site and elsewhere investigating the pros and cons of working with them. There are plenty of people who don’t have the time or wherewithal to figure out how to do these things on their own, and that’s fine. Being a creative in today’s market is HARD. Many of you work a day job or go to school or both in addition to creating your art…and don’t get me started on how many of us do that all and while also raising a family. We have three kids ourselves. This life is not easy and we hold zero judgement on those who use third parties to help facilitate their careers.

However, the bottom line is that it’s not necessary and we’re proof of that. Our model is very simple, so this may not be applicable to everyone, especially to those who have complicated tiering. If you have content that involves large files, consider using Google Drive or something similar to facilitate this if you really want out of the third party ride. I’m a photographer so I pay $1 a month for 1TB of cloud storage and I move albums in and out as needed to keep that space free for new projects. You might need to get creative to make it work for you, feel free to email us if you’d like someone to bounce ideas off of!

So let me get into the nitty gritty of what exactly we did.

We started with adding a page to our website. Of course we avoid using the term ‘Patreon’ because that’s a trade-marked name, but the words ‘patron’ and ‘patronage’ are not! Our navigation button says Be a Patron. The url is bradfordloomis.com/patronage.

Our page tells our story of what we’ve been doing, what we want to do and why we’re starting a subscription service.

We then have a button for a one time contribution. This is for people who want to either pay for a whole year in advance or who want to give above and beyond the subscription fees.

Then we have our subscription tier descriptions and the buttons for both.

How you do this is completely up to you. We’re starting with this model and we will alter it as needed once we see how our supportive community interacts with it.

Our buttons are embedded via PayPal and they take the patrons to this screen (obviously the dollar amount changes depending on which tier they choose).

As you can see, they can use this service even if they don’t have a PayPal account.

As far as getting the buttons, log into your account, go to tools and then choose PayPal Buttons.

Click Subscribe.

Follow the instructions to create and embed your buttons!

We had our web developer make the buttons look less PayPal-y to fit into the aesthetic of Bradford’s website better but that isn’t necessary of course. Embedding them will be different on whatever your website platform is but all platforms will be able to support embedded buttons.

That’s it. You can of course add photos and videos and all the other bells and whistles that are available on a Patreon page to make it more interesting than ours. We’re working on a video right now because it’s always best to have the information out there in different ways so you can cater to how people in your supportive community learn–some people are visual, some auditory and some, like me, prefer to read. Cover all your bases, when you can!

Finally, we use a private Facebook group to interact with our patrons. We are investigating working this into our website as a forum or even a web-app but for now there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel when FB does a pretty good job already.  We do FB live videos here, post links to downloadable content that is available to both tiers, etc.

Please feel free to comment down below if you have any questions (we will delete spam and disrespectful garbage comments!) or email me at kimberly(at)lineageartistry(dot)com.

One last thing: At first glance Lineage Artistry looks like it is itself a middleman, which makes this post seem a bit hypocritical. One thing to note is that there is a big difference between investing in someone who has gone before you to coach you on best practices for your career and allowing a third party to take a portion of your profits when it isn’t absolutely necessary. A big reason why hosting a patron subscription service is so important to us is so we can make a little extra money and spend time meeting with other artists in a mentorship role. We meet with people often and our patrons help facilitate that! However, as with all things, moving into a more hands on role means our time needs to be compensated in a more direct way–an artist investing in us means we have more ability to invest in them. Our main goal at Lineage is to teach people how to then “go and do” rather than doing for them.