Kickstarter is essentially a hub of interactions between creators and their true fans, after all. It removes the barrier between artist and fan (and, more broadly, producer and consumer), creating the possibility for an exchange that’s more fulfilling, efficient, and emotionally resonant than anything mass-production affords us. What mattered more: the quality of In/Rainbows’ music or that Radiohead went directly to true fans (creating new ones in the process) to release it?

It’s a provocative theory that we all want to believe. It sounds so simple, so weirdly doable when all we ever hear is how internet killed the art star and that your iTunes library can and will be held against you in a court of law. There’s no way it could possibly be true, right?

Based on data from the first three months of Kickstarter’s existence, it looks like there’s more than something to it. To date, if a project manages to get to 25% of its funding goal, it has a 94% success rate. Here’s a visual to illustrate that. The X axis represents percentage funded, the Y axis shows the percentage of projects that have reached that