What we have is a new set of middlemen, the crowdfunding services, who skim off a percentage of each successfully funded project. Their genius is to make the big feel small, where you’re both individually valued and a part of a cosy digital island of like-minded people, but in many ways perform the same function of a label: a facilitator for culture. They’re not merely a cog – Kickstarter carefully selects the projects it allows – but this isn’t a total revolution yet, infrastructure-wise.

More conceptually, the problem is that a crowd tends to know what it wants. A campaign that brings a massive band to a small town is true democracy, and hugely heartening – but these and crowdfunding projects tend to work most effectively when you’re preaching to the choir, where fandom can be leveraged. For a project whose worth to the potential funder is less immediately demonstrable – and where fandom can’t fill that gap – it can be tricky.